The Fairy who Could
by SearingMeteorite
Summary: Thrown into the world of Fiore after his untimely death, Emiya Shirou doesn't quite know what to think-only that a very anxious Saber waits for him at home. What will he do? Where will he go? Follow Emiya Shirou as he explores the world of Fiore and meets its heroes. Unlimited Saber Works Shirou, Fate route. See my profile for more details.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer: I do not own Fairy Tail.**

If Gilgamesh had one regret in the 5th Holy Grail War, it was that he'd died several days too early.

As he stepped out of Tohsaka Tokiomi's summoning circle, the Golden King had made it apparent to everyone listening that he'd only come for amusement. It was something he got plenty of in the ensuing carnage of the 4th Holy Grail War, thanks to his Master's apprentice. Kirei Kotomine had a suppressed bloodlust and a knack for theatrics that left the Golden King well-entertained, and he'd made sure the Golden King enjoyed his show-a show featuring the ugly nature of humans as Servant and Master tore each other apart. So when Kirei Kotomine promised an encore for the 5th Holy Grail War, he expected a spectacular show. But he hadn't expected Kiritsugu's adopted son to participate with his King of Knights, he hadn't expected Shirou to become his competition. When he confronted Saber about both of these things, he hadn't expected the young upstart to destroy him as if he were nothing.

If the King of Heroes had stayed slightly longer, he may have found Shirou Emiya's plight amusing. He might've made a condescending comment on the irony as Shirou fought past a contaminated Saber Alter and dealt a fatal blow to Kirei Kotomine. He might've laughed at Shirou Emiya's destitute mind as he struggled to realize that Saber would disappear. He'd certainly be amused by the faker's "false" determination as, against the King of Knights' wishes, he'd traced Caliburn and destroyed the Holy Grail himself. Perhaps the exciting- if not entirely happy- life that Shirou and Saber would've lived out together would've made him puke, but he would've given anything to see Saber's expression when Shirou suddenly announced that he, against all social and romantic expectations of the Servant, would travel around the world to save people.

He would've gladly surrendered a vial of Immortality Elixir just to see Shirou disappear, even as the holy sword in his hands erased the existence of a Prime Evil within Egypt.

But this isn't a story about Gilgamesh's isn't a story about what the King of Heroes would've done if Shirou hadn't slain him on the bridge of Fuyuki. This is a story of magic and miracles, of intrigue and adventure, of comedies and tragedies. This is the tale of a man whose determination broke the boundaries of his mortality and put him among the ranks of Faeries.

This is the story of Emiya Shirou- the Mark of Heroes- and those with him.

"MEPHISTO!"

Shirou's mighty war cry commanded the attention of the Prime Evil. The Lord of Fear snarled and raised a paw to strike him down. His circuits sparked as they burned out, white-hot iron rods inserted themselves along his spine and his arms, but the young Hero-to-be stood his ground. Saber would not yield an inch to this monster, and neither would he. But the kind blonde girl back home reminded him of his promise, his affection, and his one regret.

"I'm sorry, Saber." A wistful smile danced across his lips as he thought of the young girl waiting for him at home. She was probably meditating, her righteous aura permeating through the dojo as the moon's clear light danced across her blonde hair. "We'll meet in Avalon."

"CALIBURN!"

The glowing sword in his raised hands swung down. Its righteous light tore through the desert air and painted the entire desert in its whitewash. When the strange desert light finally faded, neither demon nor hero remained; only the glowing-hot glass upon the bare sand dunes spoke of the Japanese boy's deed.

* * *

"WHOA!"

"What happened?"

"Who is this person?"

"Man, look at his burnt clothing! Did he get into a fight with a wizard?"

"Probably got beaten up by Salamander. Hey, are you alright?"

The light sensation of someone patting his cheek brought Shirou around, and he looked up, half expecting an Arabic man in cloth wrapppings. He certainly did not expect a swarm of townsmen in modern fashion staring down at him. Nor did he expect to find lumpy cobblestones digging into his back as he woke up. He blinked hard as the sun's glare struck his eyes, wrinkled his nose against the strong sea breeze. Was he in a port town? The last he remembered, he'd been trudging through a nigh impassable desert, hundreds of miles away from the closest oasis...

"I think he's fine."

"We should bring him to get help. Hey, boy, can you walk?"

Wait. He had been in a fight, hadn't he? He'd been hunting the demon lord Mephisto, and he'd burnt all his mana on his final strike. There was no way he could've survived the backlash of using Caliburn like that... right?

He looked around absently as a doughty Merchant helped him to his feet. His eyes flickered from side to side, jumped from store sign to store sign... and stopped.

Magic.

This shop was selling magic. This shop was selling magic tomes and magic wands and magic supplies in the open. They were selling magic to the public and no one bothered to say anything about it.

Just where was he!?

* * *

"So, this kingdom is called Fiore."

"Yup, it is."

"People here learn magic just by reading tomes?"

"Yeah. As I said, I have this Colours magic. It's popular among girls, but I figure a man like you might-"

"And you just sell magic like this?"

"Look." The shopkeeper patted his balding head and glared at the orange-haired adolescent. "I've told you three times already. Magic in this Kingdom is a big part of people's lives. There's nothing strange with using magic at all- especially if you're a wizard. Now are you going to buy something, or do I have to chase you out of the store- Welcome!"

Shirou blinked at the storekeeper's jovial smile. What a fast change in attitude!

"Hey, I was just wondering."

Shirou cast a glance at her. The blonde woman stepped past him and put her hands on the counter.

"Do you know how many magic shops are here?"

Shirou cast a sidelong glance at the woman and saw her eyes- sapphire blue, just like the colours of Saber's dress. If only she had her hair tied up like a bun, or the chaste teal gems of his lover... Suddenly it was too much for Shirou to keep looking at, and he had to turn away. He found himself frozen upon the counter, his mind flooded with all his memories of Saber; Saber lying bloody upon the floor, Saber fighting on even after being cut by Berserker, Saber enjoying her noodles during their date in Shinto. That Saber would now wait at home, for an eternity, for a husband who'd never return.

"Nope, we're the only shop in Hargeon."

And yet, here she was. A girl who looked like Saber, but wasn't quite Saber.

"And I thought this was a big town! What a waste of time."

"Well, Hargeon is better known for its fishing industry than its magic," the shopkeeper explained, oblivious to Shirou's distress. "Only ten percent of the entire town uses magic, so this shop caters more to travellers like you. Might I suggest this colours magic? It's very popular with girls because it lets you change the colours of your hair and your clothes. Purple~" The shopkeeper twirled a finger over his head, and Shirou found himself treated to a purple-haired clown in purple garments. He chuckled, and the shopkeeper gave him a dirty look.

"Actually, I'm here for powerful Celestial Gate Keys," the blonde added helpfully.

"Gate keys, huh?"

Shirou's ears perked up. Gate Keys? This conversation just got more interesting.

"Wow!"

The newcomer's pale hand reached past Shirou and hovered over a silver key on display. The key had an emblem of a snowman's head, Shirou noted, and it could open a gate for a spirit to be summoned. As to where the spirit came from... his Structural Grasp continued to pour knowledge of the key into him, but suddenly the tracer found himself unable to understand any of it. It was as if a stone-age person had run into binary code- most of it was just too complex for his brain to understand.

"Ah, that is the Canis Minor key. It's not very powerful, though."

"Whatever," the girl pouted. "I want it anyway. How much for it?"

"Twenty thousand jewels."

Shirou's jaw nearly dropped. Twenty thousand jewels? Not even Tohsaka, whose entire branch of magic was based off of gems, could boast of having a thousand! Just what did Fiore's economy run off of?

"How much?" The blonde woman asked menacingly, only to receive the same reply.

It was clear that the shopkeeper wasn't about to lower his price any day, Shirou realized, and the customer seemed too eager to let it go just like this. Well, he supposed, it was up to him to do something about it.

 _Trace, on!_

"Say, Shopkeeper-san." Shirou flashed the shopkeeper a shady look. "How about I even the price a little?" He raised his other hand, which was now clutching a very jagged dagger. The shopkeeper's eyes popped out of their slits as he placed the amethyst weapon onto the table. "The dagger is called Rule Breaker," he offered. "It breaks any and all magic upon contact. Why don't you cut the deal a bit?"

* * *

"Shirou… Emiya, is it? What a strange name."

"Yes, that's my name." Shirou shrugged. "Yours is Lucy Heartfilia, right?"

"Yeah," the blonde girl shrugged, slightly embarrassed. "Thanks for helping with the key back there, I guess. That dagger must have meant a lot to you."

"It's no problem, Lucy." Shirou grimaced at the idea. The dagger had nearly stolen Saber from him, and he certainly didn't miss it- even if this one was a projection. The pair walked over the battlements of Hargeon, Lucy savouring the beautiful sea before her, Shirou struggling to keep his feelings buried. "You're a magician, right? What are magicians like in this world?"

"That's a pretty hard question." Lucy's thoughts drifted guitily to Mirajane, but there was no way she'd tell a stranger any of that! "There are magicians of all sorts, and really… the one thing they have in common is that it's their job to use magic. You see, most Magicians belong to a guild."

"Guild?" Shirou raised an eyebrow. "An organization that helps their research into magic?"

"Well, not really. Guilds are organizations, but most of them have their own small purposes. More importantly, though, Guilds offer quests for wizards, and wizards gain an income for quests. There's much more to a guild than that, but that's generally what most guilds do." She blushed a little. "I've always wanted to join Fairy Tail. They're really strong and famous. What about you, though? You look like a Magician yourself."

"Me?" Shirou asked with feigned surprise. "What makes you think I'm more than just a commoner?"

Lucy flashed him a dark look. "We met inside a magic shop, remember?"

Shirou opened his mouth to reply, but he never got the chance. Just then, a bunch of girls charged past Shirou and threw him onto the floor.

"Did you hear, Salamander's in town!" one screeched excitingly.

"You mean that Fairy Tail Mage? He must be so cool!"said another.

"Wait," Lucy thought aloud. "Salamander's in town?" She turned to Shirou and flashed an apologetic smile. "Sorry there, Shirou, but it seems I've gotta go!"

Shirou had never seen another person run quite so fast.

"Salamander, huh…"

Shirou glanced over the town, pensieve. He'd heard that name before, something about him having gotten into a fight with that Fairy Tail mage when he was helped off the streets. From the looks of it, Salamander was probably a powerful wizard, and a wizard who used fire at that. He was probably rich, too, if he could throw a party on a big ship like the one across Hargeon's port right now.

He looked down at his hands and cursed. Saber was still at home, waiting worriedly for him to return from his hopeless quest. And here he was, stuck in a world that wasn't his own. With not a penny- jewel, he correted himself- there was nowhere he could go. He could probably use magic to do something, but without a guild…

Wait.

Magic.

This was a world of magic. Magic was an integral part of peoples' everyday lives, like how it'd been in the age of the Gods in his own world. Did that mean, perhaps, that magic was much stronger here? Well, nothing quite like a test to find out.

"Trace, on."

 _Judge the concept of creation._

 _Hypothesise the basic structure._

 _Duplicate the material composition._

 _Imitate the skill of its forging._

 _Sympathise with the process of its growth._

 _Reproduce the effects of time upon the concept._

 _Supersede every step of the process!_

Shirou panted heavily as Caliburn materialized in his hands. The bejeweled sword, his only memento of Saber now, gleamed in his hands. And yet, even as he felt the power of the King of Knights flowing through his body, he could feel that Caliburn was somewhat… different, now, that it felt far more like the real object than just a projection of his imagination. What was more, though, was that while the projection took a lot out of him, it hadn't cost quite as much as it should've had.

The mage looked down wistfully at Caliburn in his hands. Saber was probably still at home, waiting for a husband who would never return from his hopeless quest, and he would be stuck in this world, unable to to meet her until death finally united them.

"My sword will henceforth be by your side, and your fate will henceforth be my fate."

Shirou smiled, a small, wistful smile. Even when they were worlds apart, Saber still reminded him of their contract, their pact. And since he'd promised to meet her in Avalon, he had to uphold his end of the pact.

Shirou had to become a _hero_.

I'll join a guild, then. I'll follow in the steps of my ideal and save everyone. Then, Saber, we'll finally meet in Avalon.

He glanced at the giant ship on the horizon. The Fairy Tail mage was probably having the time of his life, enjoying his party among his numerous guests, and Shirou didn't really want to pull him out of his enjoyment. But if Shirou wanted to join Fairy Tail, he had to start somewhere.

Salamander wouldn't mind a visitor, would he?


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer: I own no characters or content in Fate or in Fairy Tail.**

If there was one thing Shirou knew about himself, it was that he wanted to be a hero. That, and that he was an idiot.

His ally and good friend in the 5th Grail War, Rin Tohsaka, had said as much. She'd even gone to extreme lengths just to impress on him just how much of a klutz he was. If she'd been here, Shirou thought sadly, she'd definitely be laughing her head off at his utter stupidity-namely, that he'd chosen to follow a pink-haired guy with a talking cat onto Salamander's ship.

"Alright, Shinji-"

"The name's Shirou."

"Here's the plan. you go in and rescue Lucy, and I'll beat everyone up."

"That's it!?" Shirou gaped at Natsu's triumphant fist-punch.

"How do you know you can beat that guy, Natsu? He's the famous Salamander, and he's a member of the strongest guild, Fairy Tail!"

To his horror, it was not Natsu who answered, but his talking cat Happy. "Natsu is in Fairy Tail," he chirped happily and grabbed a bite from the fish in its hand. "That other guy isn't."

"I'm going to beat him up for using Fairy Tail's name like this," Natsu insisted. "I won't let that fake sully my guild's name." His fist burst into flame and he drew it back, ready to tear a hole in the ship's canopy. Shirou followed his example; in a split second, the imge of a cocking hammer drawn back and ready to fire materialized in his mind, and the blueprint of his chosen weapon flooded through his circuits.

* * *

"There's no way I'd let you do that to me," Lucy huffed. "I want to join Fairy Tail, but I'd never do anything like this!" She pointed an accusing finger. "You're using sleep magic on this ship. Just what do you think you're trying to do?"

Salamander drew his royal purple cloak closer and smirked. "I see you're not quite as gullible as I thought. Men!" At his command, several scruffy ruffians with swords in their arms rushed into the room. "You should've been a good girl, Lucy. You wouldn't have to get hurt then." Several more men marched past them with unconscious women in their arms, smirking at the cornered mage. "Welcome to my Slave Ship!"

"I'm not joining your slave harem, pervert!" Lucy cried. She brandished her keys, but Salamander was already there before her, and he grabbed the keys out of her hands.

"Celestial Keys, huh?" Salamander twirled the key around his finger. "They only work for people with whom the spirits have formed a contract, which means they're pretty useless to me." With a casual flick, the keys flew out of the room.

To any other person, the keys were mere tools, used to achieve a certain end of their choice.

But Lucy had grown up with each of her Celestial Spirits, and they meant something entirely different. To see her contracts, the marks of her hard-earned friendship, be so casually tossed aside... it was just too much for the young Celestial Wizard. "I hate you, Salamander!" she cried. "You're the worst kind of wizard! And to think that there's a whole guild of people like you... I don't want to join Fairy Tail anymore," she finally managed, tears in her eyes.

Salamander barely batted an eyelid. "Take her away." He waved a hand. The sailors advanced with hungry looks in their eyes-

WHAM!

-and all hell broke loose.

* * *

Just as Natsu prepared to break through, Shirou saw a glitter of light fly out of the window.

"Wait a minute," he ordered Natsu. He couldn't recall where he'd seen the strange shiny object before, but he had a feeling that whatever it was, it would be very important.

"I'm going to fetch that."

 _Trace, on!_

The blueprints of all the swords he'd seen in the Gates of Babylon flashed through his mind. Even if he didn't have time to project all of them then, his Structural Grasp had practically went on overdrive, dutifully engraving the existence of each weapon in his heart. Thanks, Gilgamesh, he thought, as the sword most suitable to his use sprouted to mind.

The cocking hammer slammed down, and his circuits powered up. With a flash of light, a dark, light saber materialized in his hand, its edge glowing in bloodlust. If he threw it in just the right way...

"HRUNTING!"

The cruel weapon hurtled down and caught the key ring just as it entered the water. At his command, the weapon circled back into his hand, where it faithfully awaited its master's call. He looked at Natsu to judge his reaction… and found himself very, very horrified.

"Shirou has a boomerang!" Happy quipped with starry eyes. Natsu oogled at the weapon in his hand and gave him a pleading look. "That is so cool! Let me play with that later" he begged.

With a sigh, Shirou tossed the Noble Phantasm to the eager Dragon Slayer and examined the object in his hand. He gasped as he realized just what the objects were.

Celestial Keys.

6 Celestial Keys in his hand, three gold, three silver. Among the Silver keys, one had the mark of Canis Minor- the very same mark that Lucy fawned over several hours ago. Shirou knew just how important each key was to Lucy, and if they'd been thrown overboard...

...then Lucy was in danger.

 _Save her._

He had to act. NOW!

With a wordless war cry, Shirou projected his weapon and slammed it into the roof.

The boat shook violently as Caliburn- and Shirou- blasted through its ceiling and landed foot first on a purple-shirted goon. He looked around pensively; the room was littered with sleeping women, both young and middle-aged, and he was surrounded by wary pirates. Lucy sat helplessly behind him, her reddened eyes looking askance at his back. Before him stood a handsome man in a purple robe pinned with a fire emblem- likely the master of fire magic he'd heard so much about.

He had no doubt, now. Only one guy could have thrown those keys out- the guy who, even now, smirked at him with the arrogance of a certain Golden King.

"I believe these keys are yours, Lucy." Without taking his eye off the Magus, he tossed aside the ring of keys and turned to face the troublemaker. "I thought you would be a good man, Salamander," he seethed. "And yet, here you are, bullying a young girl with your magic powers."

He looked mournfully at all the unconscious women around him. His rage burned, simmering below his deceptively calm exterior, as he watched them get carried away against their will.

 _Then save them._

"You're done here, Salamander," Shirou said murderously.

"What I do is my business, boy." Salamander smiled in condescension. "Get him."

"You're dead meat, boy!" The goons grinned, a predatorial grin as they bore down on him with their swords raised, ready to divide the budding hero into a million pieces. Shirou stared them down and raised Caliburn, his eyes glued to the movement of each opponent.

 _"Trace, ON!"_

The vigour of a young warrior king flooded through his limbs, even as the experience of Caliburn's previous wielder wrote themselves into his memory. The swords that closed on him slowed in his mind's eye until he could see each of their paths as they tried to cleave him apart, but the King of Knights would never fall to such a blow, and neither would he!

With a wordless cry, Shirou reinforced his limbs and slammed Caliburn into each sword as it passed.

"Woah!"

"H-How?"

"Impossible!"

The young boy should've been cleaved into pieces as each sword strike bit at him- there was just no way that a man could move so fast, so skillfully with a sword. And yet, the young boy swung away, his sword going back and forth between each thug's blade consistently and forcefully, turning each strike with two-handed swings almost too fast for belief!

I'll save these people, Shirou thought. His arms moved on their own, his sword parried every blow. I won't let these thugs get close!

Bora growled. "I've had enough of your interference, troublemaker. I'll just deal with you and leave." He swept his hand and a purple magic circle burst into existence before him, spewing column after weaving column of continuous flame.. "Prominence Whip!"

"As if I'll let you!" Shirou disengaged from his opponents with a powerful swing, only to be tossed back by a… solid ribbon of flame? The columns devastated the ground he stood on as he leapt away, brandishing his holy sword. Damn, to be beaten like this when he was so close to his goal...

But a hero would not give up, not even if he was outmatched, and neither would Shirou!

 _"Trace, On!"_

Neon circuit patterns wrapped themselves over Shirou's shirt as he took it off and put it between him and Bora. He charged, the shirt upon his exposed shoulder tearing under column after hungry column of blunt fire- it wouldn't last forever even with his Reinforcement magic, certainly not under such strong fire. But to cover several metres between him and this fire mage…

"WHAT!?"

… it was enough!

Caliburn burst through the remains of Shirou's shirt. The man who called himself Salamander barely ducked in time, only to find himself one haircut short.

"That's enough!" he said hoarsely. "I'll show you what I'm really made of!" A second magic circle appeared before his chest, ready to blast Shirou into oblivion-

"HIGH PUNCH!"

-and disappeared as a fist wrapped in red-hot flames slammed into Salamander's chest.

"Salamander, huh?" Natsu demanded. "You say you're from Fairy Tail?" he glared down at the semi-conscious wizard.

"What's it to you-ooof!"

"Your days of fraud and slavery are done, monster." Shirou projected the blunt sword, Cortana, and slapped the fire mage across the face. The flame-haired tracer turned to Natsu and smiled. "I guess we make a pretty good team, huh."

"Yeah, totally!" Natsu grinned. "We caught him, and we didn't destroy anything important!"

His good mood was instantly ruined when Happy pointed out helpfully that he'd wrecked the boat.

"That was all Shirou's fault!"

* * *

The orange-haired teenager looked up at the duo sleeping before him and sighed.

It wasn't the Salamander business that had him on edge. Once the local enforcement officials had identified the Fire mage as Bora of Prominence and arrested the lot, they'd been handsomely rewarded for capturing the criminal. They'd even gotten a hefty bonus for not destroying the town while apprehending him, something that made the Saber incarnate raise an eyebrow as he accepted it from the grateful Hargeon governor. The captured girls had been safely returned to their families, and those who didn't wake up in time were safely under the custody of local law enforcement.

It was Shirou's first experience of saving people in this world. Thinking of it brought a smile to his scowling lips. Their happy, peaceful expressions as they left the police station for home warmed Shirou's heart, strengthened his resolve to defend them when the need so arose. He'd even discovered just how laughably easy it'd become to trace anything that wasn't a B-ranked Noble Phantasm. Thanks to the abundance of mana in the air around him; in this world, energy shortage would not be a problem.

No, Shirou thought, the problem was Saber-no, Lucy.

Moments after Lucy and Shirou had both expressed interest to join Fairy Tail, the Dragon Slayer had positively dragged them aboard a train bound for Magnolia Town- no small feat, considering that he'd left Lucy-and-Shirou-sized trenches across half the port-town's roads while doing so. It was only when the train had begun chugging toward Fairy Tail's hometown that he'd realized- he'd be around Lucy a lot more. In many ways, the sleeping Celestial Wizard wasn't exactly Saber; she was flirty, fussy, playful, vain. But whenever he laid eyes on her…

… the image of Saber in her white blouse and navy blue skirt, waiting for a partner who'd never return from his journey, leapt into his mind.

Shirou had resolved to meet her in Avalon, and he knew that she'd be there, waiting for him too. They were sword and scabbard, inseparable in their shared dream for a distant Utopia. But just the thought of leaving her alone in her anxiety and grief poured hydrochloric acid into Shirou's chest and wracked his mind with guilt. And now that he and not-Saber were going to join Fairy Tail…

… he'd be reminded, day and night, of the very painful way he left her behind.

"Shirou, are you okay?"

Ah, Happy. The teenager managed a grin. If there was one person he could talk to about this, he reckoned it'd be Happy.

The cat was perceptive, wasn't he?

"Not exactly, I guess," Shirou replied. "There's someone I love who's gone, and I didn't even get to say goodbye to her."

"Well…" the cat wondered aloud. "Natsu can't find his dad, either. We came all this way thinking that Salamander would be him, but…" he chewed dejectedly on his fish.

Shirou glanced thoughtfully at the pink-haired guy. There was something common between them, definitely. For one, Natsu had close to nothing between his ears when it came to social propriety; Shirou could literally imagine Rin going "I know it's impossible, but somehow you're even more stupid than he is!" on the pink-haired guy. Even so, they made an impossibly good team against Bora and his goons. It was as if Natsu had known exactly where Shirou would falter and stepped up flawlessly to cover his gaps. And if anybody could hold the same naive ideals as he did…

... Shirou was pretty sure that'd be that young firebreather.

Though, Shirou thought with Rin-worthy devilishness, he'd probably tease Natsu to death about his blunt stupidity.

"Magnolia Town!" the announcer declared.

"Wake up, Natsu." Shirou shook him gently.

"Gyahh!" The young man leapt to his feet with impressive vigour, only to turn green as he realized… he was still on a train!

"He's really bad with trains, isn't he?" Lucy wondered with a yawn. Shirou shrugged, looked away from the blonde and offered Natsu a shoulder. "Let's go, Natsu. It'd be terrible if you missed your stop like this."

"Natsu knows all about it!" Happy yelled jovially behind them.

* * *

"This is Fairy Tail's Guild Hall!" Happy announced proudly.

Shirou and Lucy gasped. He'd heard about Buckingham Palace and the Clock Tower from Rin's frequent letters. That wasn't to say that Fairy Tail actually competed with them; contrary to their exquisite glory, the Guild Hall before him looked far more stable and dependable- like a white bastion of justice upon a peaceful land.

Not that the city was anything to laugh at, but even Magnolia City's majestic presence couldn't quite compare with this guild hall… could it?

"I'm back!" Natsu announced with a kick to the guild door. As the mighty guild hall appeared, Shirou found himself looking at… a tavern?

A wood-furnished tavern so large that easily hundreds, if not thousands, of wizards occupied every table and chair beneath its cathedral ceiling. And man, what wizards they were! He could smell each and every one of them, the overpowering scent of their mighty magic seeping through him with the richness of a seafood hotpot.

"Hey, Natsu, welcome back!"

He walked in, speechless as table after table of wizards turned to welcome his pink-haired companion. Sure, they looked like ordinary tavern folk, but his sensitive nose picked up each and every piece of their magic and told him that they were no pushovers. "Wow," he heard Lucy gasp. "I'm finally within the Fairy Tail Guild!"

"Hey Natsu, I heard you went to Hargeon and caused a ruckus-"

WHAM!

Shirou turned just in time to see Natsu's feet connect with the wizard- who promptly slammed into the wall behind him. "Hey, you lied about Salamander!" Natsu accused. "I'm gonna kick your butt!"

Of course, he completely ignored Lucy's protests at his violence.

"I'm just passing about the rumours…" the wizard said weakly.

"What!? You fed me rumours?"

Shirou couldn't help but feel bad for the wizard as his companion strode toward him. He stepped forward to help the man-when the entire bar table flipped and sent him sprawling into a corner. The battered Shirou looked up to find that an entire table's worth of wizards had just shared in his fate. "BAR FIGHT!" Natsu declared victoriously.

Now he'd really done it!

"Now now, Natsu," Happy consoled nonchalantly. "I think you need to calm do-"

The tiny cat's peaceful act was swiftly ended by a punch to the face.

Shirou looked up to find the entire hall in an all out food fight- complete with people grabbing people, people slamming people into tables, and people burying other people in wine kegs. He'd heard of warrior mages before, but to get into daily fights like these… just how durable were these people?

"So Natsu! You finally made it back, huh!?"

The teenager turned in the direction of a very furious voice. There, before him, stood a handsome young man with messy brunette hair and… did he forget to wear his clothes? The logo of Fairy Tail emblazoned itself proudly across his left pectoral, as if to declare that "GRAY FULLBUSTER THE FAIRY TAIL MEMBER WILL NEVER WEAR A SHIRT!"

"It's time we settled things once and for all!" he declared, walking menacingly toward the tangle of limbs and hands that was Natsu's fight-

"Gray, your clothes." A husky voice declared, and the very gruff wizard Gray Fullbuster stopped short and declared proudly- "I don't have time for that, Cana!"

An increasingly bewildered Shirou turned his attention to the speaker. It was a woman at the bar, and she was in… trousers and a bra top? The woman clearly didn't give a damn about the wine glass in her hand, because after a nonchalant comment about "not taking a man here because they don't have class" she picked up a keg and began drinking from it like nobody's business.

"Come here and fight me, Natsu!"

"Not until you put some clothes on!"

"It's only noon and you guys are already whining like spoilt brats!"

Shirou barely moved out of the way of a very large, tan man in spiky white hair. The musclebound Not-Archer crossed his arms and looked on at the fight, unimpressed, before striking a crab pose in his navy blue suit. "I'm a REAL MAN!" he declared with a straight face. "Want me to prove it to ya?"

"Shut up, Elfman!"

Shirou's eyes popped as Natsu's and Gray's fists connected simultaneously with the buff wizard and sent him out of the fight in two seconds flat. Yep, he thought sarcastically. Definitely a man who believes that he can solve problems with two good fists.

"Jeez, it's so noisy around here."

"Kyaaaa! You're so cool, Loke!"

Shirou turned over and immediately regretted it. The man named Loke had each arm wrapped around a woman; he was exchanging suave glances between them and his blonde companion. Shirou decided to ignore him anyway and walk away from the mess-and nearly ran into a white-haired girl in a pink dress.

"Hello, people!" the girl smiled. "I'm Mirajane. Are you two new here?"

"I guess," Shirou scratched himself self-consciously. Behind him, Lucy turned almost crimson in excitement. "It's Mirajane! IN THE FLESH!" "Are you some kind of celebrity?" he asked, a little confused.

"Guess I am," Mirajane replied casually. "Don't bother stopping them, they're always like this around here. I'll just leave them alone. Besides-"

"TRACE ON!"

Shirou brandished the newly traced Cortana in his hand and sent a senseless Elfman into the wall.

"It's pretty fun like this, don't you think?"

He wasn't quite fast enough to stop Gray Fullbuster crashing into him, though. One thing he noticed right before the cool mage's body buried him was just how STARK NAKED the ice mage was in this public place. It was almost too much to ask Lucy to take- he could see her turning bright pink in his presence. And the insensitive guy even had the nerve to ask her for underwear!?

A giant black man stomped into the room, and Shirou knew he'd reached his Insanity limit. He passed out across the floor, utterly unconscious.

* * *

 _Swords._

 _The barren landscape before him was filled with swords. Swords that served both good and evil, swords of all shapes and sizes, swords that painted the ground with the dull colour of their rusting steel. He could feel each sword's history coursing through him as he laid his eyes on each of them, and he wondered if he'd been a sword just like them._

 _It was foreign to him. The world of rusted swords, lying unused on the ground, galled Shirou. Swords did not like being planted on the ground. Each sword here would rather be in the hands of a skilled swordsman, carving a beautiful future for his peers and defending them from harm._

 _Thus, then, the power of each sword rested on the desire of their wielders, to achieve peace for their family, peace for their nation, and peace for a safe world- to give the promise of Avalon so that the people could enjoy Utopia._

 _His thoughts seeped out and emanated in every direction. He could feel a subtle change, a small but important shift in the wind that swept through the landscape._

 _The swords stirred in the barren ground, struggling to break lose. The amber clouds above him parted, and the first rays of a powerful sun shone down upon the world of swords._

* * *

"-rou! Wake up, Shirou!"

Shirou blinked. Happy stood on his chest and prodded his mouth with a fish. "Get up, Shirou!" he urged in his tiny voice. "Natsu's going on a mission!"

The orange-haired teenager turned to his pink-haired companion. Natsu walked out of the guild hall as if he had something very important to do and no one to talk to about it. It was awkward, really, that someone as brash and spontaneous as Natsu would just leave without a word… unless he had something to prove.

"What's up?" he asked Mirajane over the bar.

"Makarov sent Macao to Mt. Hakobe to hunt Vulcans a week ago," Mirajane explained. "He hasn't returned since. He told the Macao's son, Romeo, that his dad would be fine, but the Romeo ran out, crying." She looked thoughtfully at the drinking glass in her hands. "Natsu's decided to find that missing wizard. Perhaps it's that Natsu sees himself in Romeo, and he really wants to help."

Natsu wants to save the kid because he wants to be saved too, Shirou thought.

"I'm going." He grinned, a confident grin that he hadn't used since he'd last been with Saber.

"But what about your guild symbol?" Mirajane asked after him, but it was all in vain- Shirou was already gone.

* * *

"Hey! Put me down!"

Natsu and Shirou ignored her and hefted the giant clock onto their shoulders. "It's definitely warmer inside the clock," Shirou thought aloud. "But if you're going to turn back just because the weather's too cold, you can't save anyone."

"I'm liking you more and more, Shirou." Natsu flashed the budding hero a grin. "You know what? Let's make a team sometime. You, me, and Lucy back up there-"

RUMBLE!

A giant flash of white charged past Shirou and Natsu, and suddenly neither Lucy nor clock was there anymore. Natsu turned with a burning fist, but it caught only thin air.

"Was that the Vulcan!? What speed!" Shirou turned to see a giant white Gorillamonster with a face that looked just like that old man in that Hargeon magic shop. "Wait. That's a yeti!"

"Nope," Happy countered. "That is a vulcan."

"Me like human woman!" the yeti declared with his face plastered on Horologium. He threw a punch in Shirou's direction. The budding mage barely stepped aside on time, the shock of the punch sent him butt first into the snow. If anything, the Yeti was stronger, faster than he was, and he couldn't fight it- not as Shirou.

 _Emiya Shirou is not a fighter. But if you cannot beat your enemy, imagine something that can._

"Trace, on!"

The sword that he'd just traced belonged to a nameless swordsman. Nearly as tall as the lank swordsman himself, the five-foot-long Monoshizao bore upon it the mark of a life dedicated to swordsmanship, a single technique honed to such perfection that it could cut down a swallow in just three swings. Right now, that experience and familiarity surged through his body, and Shirou knew that the Yeti was no longer his match.

"So he can talk, huh?" Natsu cracked his knuckles.

"Don't just stand there. Hurry up and save me! she demands," Lucy's Horologium said with dignity. Without a second word, the Yeti hefted him up on his shoulder and marched off- right into Shirou's blade.

"Me no like man!" The yeti drew back his fist. "Go away!" The punch slid past Shirou's traced blade, but even with his limbs reinforced Shirou could feel the inhuman strength behind that punch. With Sasaki's peerless sword skills, he managed to block all of the punches, but the effort left him reeling on the mountainside.

Luckily for him, help came soon in the form of a giant fire kick from Natsu. The vulcan slammed against the mountainside and slid down, winded.

"Every one from Fairy Tail is my friend, including Shirou over here- which is why I'm not leaving without Macao! Now tell me where he is, or I'll-"

His words were lost when the Vulcan slapped a punch on his head, or tried to. The Dragon slayer lifted an arm to block and the mountainside crumbled beneath him, but he took the blow against his forearm and stayed standing. For a second, the Vulcan was stunned, his form stuck right above Natsu.

"Hidden technique."

And that was all the time Shirou needed.

"Swallow Reversal!"

A single sword cannot cut down a swallow. But if you can scare the swallow with the first swing and cut off his escape with the second, the third will allow you to strike down the agile bird. All three swings would have to be executed in a single breath, and the swordsman practiced swing after swing tirelessly, diligently, if only so that he could manage the one attack that was denied to mortal ken. Eventually, the swordsman managed a swing that lay beyond the ken of mortals- a refraction of multiple dimensions, such that all three swords, all three swings, existed within that single instant.

Shirou was a mortal, and the closest he could manage was one swing after another. But if he could swing the blade around fast enough-

WHAP!

-Even the Vulcan could not dodge it!

The first blow cut a line beneath the Vulcan's feet. As he took to the air, the second blow swept past his shoulder, leaving him dead in the water for the third. Monoshizao caught the giant monster right in the stomach and sent him into the wall.

"Unbelievable…" Natsu mouthed.

The monster lay unconscious, his form buried against the mountainside. Shirou felt a sudden wave of pain ripple through his forearm, and his focus split; the long katana in his hands broke into a million glittering pieces.

"That purple man…" Happy echoed, just as shocked. "So strong!"

Purple man?

 _Long, flowing lavender robes adorned the lank swordsman. His lavender ponytail fluttered behind him as he raised his long katana and swung. In that brief moment, the swordsman swung not one sword, but three._

But even if they'd seen Assassin, it was definitely Shirou who swung the sword, Shirou who struck down the Vulcan, right? Shirou thought furiously. He couldn't have just summoned Assassin so easily, not in Fiore!

His train of thoughts was interrupted by a nasty groan. A man now lay where the Vulcan had been, his clothes torn and his body battered. Natsu rushed over anxiously. "Macao!" he called. "You can't die here, Romeo's waiting back home for you. Wake up!"

"...Natsu?"

Lucy's eyes popped. "Could it be that Macao was that perv all along?"

* * *

It turned out that Macao had been possessed by the Vulcan's take-over magic. He'd valiantly beaten nineteen Vulcans alone, only to be subdued by the twentieth. After they'd returned from Mt. Hakobe, Shirou watched both Natsu and Lucy bid a happy farewell to Romeo and his dad, but his mind remained stuck on the inhuman monster he'd faced.

 _What if he'd taken Macao's job instead?_

Against just one of the monsters, Shirou had to use everything in his arsenal. He'd even pulled out Assassin's sword and mimicked his Noble Phantasm. But there would be times where he had to save people from up to twenty of those monsters at once, and when the time came, he'd find himself utterly and thoroughly beaten.

No, Shirou thought with resolve. Saving people had never been easy, but that just meant he had to get stronger to do it. If he wanted to save people, then Shirou Emiya had to get much stronger than this.

"Hey, Shirou, you're strong!" Shirou turned. Natsu was standing at the horizon with the guild hall next to him, his fist raised in the air. "When we get back to the guild, I'll fight you!"

At least he knew where to start.


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer: I own nothing in the story below.**

 **Okay, for all those reviews in the past few days: thanks, guys. I'm still relatively new to this entire business, and I must admit that formatting and spellchecking are not my strong suits. I figured that the pagebreak didn't work because I was too used to a different way of page breaking. In any case, the review system on this website is great- I get to see exactly where I've gone wrong, and it's quite helpful (though frankly I'd rather find a beta, but it seems I don't have one in reach just yet.)**

 **Serfius: I see your pain. I was wincing myself when I read through it without the page breaks. If I figure out how to do it when I publish the stories again, that'll be great!**

 **Gettheidea: That's mostly my fault, actually. I thought it was quite unnecessary to describe how they met, given that it'd take a big chunk out of the action (at that time). I'll see if I can find a place to retcon it, but as of now, I'm keeping it the way it is until I can find a way to write it in.**

 **Guest: Hmm. I'd like to agree with you that Shirou is underpowered here, but I think you're missing something- this is Unlimited Saber Works Shirou from the Fate route, and you haven't quite seen everything he can do just yet. He might seem underpowered because he isn't pulling any of his aces just yet, but you'll get to see the tip of the iceberg in this chapter- I promise!**

 **AVP: I think I know what you mean. This chapter started off as a bit of fun writing on my part, and I didn't think it through too clearly. There are quite a few places where I could space out the action, make for more meaningful dialogue, and better scale Shirou's character development.**

 **On Soaring Wings: I can't see Shirou doing that, actually. Given how dense he can be outside a serious situation, especially if it's about a person that he isn't close to yet, I think he'd more likely fail to react to it before Lucy kicked Natsu Dragneel in the face- but I've thrown in a little tidbit for that, too, so I hope it satisfies you.**

 **A little background to this character. Because things didn't quite go as planned in the Kemu Zaleon arc, the timeline has changed. The team gets stuck in the Wind Prison for much longer than intended. As to what that has to do with anything, well... happy reading!**

 **To everyone who liked/didn't like this fic up to this point, here's the next installment. I hope you enjoy it! XD**

WHAM!

Natsu's burning fist slammed down. Durandal shook, and Shirou's reinforced arms nearly buckled under his powerful blow. Shirou held his breath and shoved the fire wizard off; Roland's unbreakable sword swung around and nearly took the young Dragneel's head off. The pink-haired wizard skidded away and stared at Shirou, panting ever so slightly. It took all of Shirou's effort to fight back a scowl- fights in Fiore seemed to go far slower than they did in the holy grail war.

"What's the matter, Natsu? By simply standing there you give Fire wizards a bad name." Shirou lifted the Unbreakable Blade to chest level. "If you won't come to me, I'll go to you instead."

Natsu snorted, a breath of fire bursting from his nostrils. "Don't get cocky! I'm going to kick your butt!" He charged forth with both fists blazing, ready to kick his fellow Fairy Tail member into oblivion-

WHAP!

-only for Durandal to smash him in the face.

The poor fire wizard fell to the ground, utterly spent.

"Shirou three, Natsu zero!" Happy chirped and chomped down on his fish. Shirou shook his head and looked down at Natsu- he couldn't shake the feeling that, somehow, he'd overestimated Natsu's suitability for him. It wasn't to say that the Fire Wizard was weak, but Shirou always found him too slow- where Lancer or Saber would've knocked him off his feet, Natsu simply prepared a second attack and gave the young tracer ample time to strike him down.

The fire wizard could handle fights beyond Shirou's ability. He'd seen Natsu overwhelm Bora's flame columns head on, and he admitted that Natsu's perserverance was definitely worth admiring. No, the problem was simply that Natsu wasn't the right type of enemy for him. If he wanted to get better, he had to fight an enemy that could do everything that he could- or more. Somebody like Saber or Lancer, or even a Spirit…

An idea popped into Shirou's head. Even if Natsu couldn't help him here, maybe their mutual teammate could.

* * *

"So just what do you think you're doing here?"

Lucy's fingers danced impatiently across the table and her tired eyes bored into the two trespassers. The two idiots before her had just broken in in the most unceremonious way, so just what was she doing, entertaining them with tea... and biscuits?

"Hey, don't sweat it! We're just having a little housewarming!" Natsu flashed her an idiotic grin. It took almost all of Lucy's willpower not to stand up and kick them clean out of the house.

The reason she didn't? Lucy glanced to her right and felt an uncomfortable leap in her heart.

"I'm sure they don't mean any harm." Shirou offered a gentle smile. "Even though it was wrong of them to do it."

Natsu and Lucy grinned sheepishly, and Lucy found a smile tugging at her lips. "They could certainly use some babysitting," she offered.

If the young tracer heard her, he gave no sign. Those intense orange eyes of his continued to bore into the teacup before him with an intensity that made her wince.

Shirou kept mostly to himself, Lucy knew, but right now he looked so tense that Lucy felt as if a single word from her would snap him. She didn't know what exactly to think of him- no matter how she looked at it, the boy just felt strange. Emiya Shirou looked like a normal wizard teenager, what with that intense look in his eyes and that confident gait in his step. He talked, he laughed, and he did his magic, just like any other wizard out there. He was even uncommonly kind, helping her out with that Celestial Key at that Hargeon shop and collecting housing requests for her when she'd been looking for a house.

But those orange eyes of his would never stay on her.

He would say something sweet and give her a reassuring glance or two, but the very moment their eyes met, his would dance almost immediately to some faraway target. He would look at something else with that faraway gaze and forget that a very attentive blonde was right next to him, just like what he was doing now.

It drove Lucy crazy, not knowing what she'd done to him to deserve... this. Did she say something that offended him? Had she bullied the young wizard when he was a kid? The second-guessing made her want to scream, but she couldn't say a thing or she feared he'd blow up.

"Is something bothering you?" she asked tentatively. The red-headed teenager shook his head no, and continued stirring his tea as if she'd never spoken in the first place. It took him a while to notice her discomfort, and even then he only murmured, "don't worry, Lucy, it's nothing."

And it seemed that Happy had noticed, too, because where he'd usually crack a really stupid joke that made her want to punch him, he remained utterly silent.

In the end, it was Natsu who saved them. "Cheer up," he offered. "It's only the start of the day, and all of you are glum already?"

"It's only the start of my tenancy and you've broken and entered," Lucy spat, a tick bulging on her forehead. The tick burst when she realized that Natsu had completely ignored her.

"I've got just the thing!" he declared. "Let's do a quest!"

The change in Shirou, Lucy swore, was a miracle.

"A quest... a quest! That's it!" Shirou slammed his fist on the table. Lucy hurried to rescue his teacup before it could fall off. "Thank you, Natsu," he continued, gratitude bursting from his face. "You're a real life saver!"

Thank the heavens, Lucy thought. "Well, I suppose I could come too," she said offhandedly. "You do have to pay me for trespassing, and this is as good a payment as any." Her eyes narrowed. "I'm taking a bigger cut."

A brief shadow passed over Shirou's expression, but it was gone before Lucy could be sure of it. "I'll come too, and you won't need to pay me," he offered eagerly. Happy punched the air, and Natsu wrapped his arms around all of them. "That's the spirit!" he declared. "Let's go get ourselves a quest!"

* * *

"Hmm… a quest, huh." Shirou pondered over the quest board before him.

Several notices and jobs plastered the tiny noticeboard, from treasure hunts to retrieval requests and calls for help. The jobs varied greatly. While some jobs only required the mage to save a cat from a tall tree, others demanded that he/she defeat twenty to thirty vulcans, or even slay a giant dragon. The price for each job also differed- some offered a paltry ten thousand jewels, but for others the price easily went up to hundreds of thousands.

Shirou found himself looking for quests where he could help people in trouble. As he looked through each of them, though, he couldn't help shaking the feeling that maybe, just maybe, he'd bitten off more than he could chew. After all, he could only handle a single Vulcan in a two-to-one fight.

His eyes caught a notice he hadn't seen before on the corner of the board, but before he could read it, Natsu had torn it clean off.

"Two Hundred Jewels for destroying a book?" Natsu stared greedily at the notice in his hands. "So we'll just burn a book from the Duke of Evaroo and we get Two Hundred Thousand Jewels? Man! We're so going for this job."

Great. That sounded like a job that he, Emiya Shirou, could handle.

He wrapped an arm around Shirou and Lucy. "Let's go! The sooner we get this over with, the sooner we'll get those jewels-"

"*AHEM!*"

Shirou turned-and his jaw dropped. Old man Makarov in his orange suit and funny hat sat on the bar before him, his gaze stern as ever. "I'm sorry, Natsu, but I think I'll be borrowing Shirou for some time." The old man jumped down from his bar and walked straight up to the young tracer.

"But we only just met!" Natsu pouted. "I mean, I haven't even brought him on a quest yet!"

A stern look from the short old man shut him up. "Shirou, come with me," he urged, and turned toward the inner room. Shirou followed him. Just what could the Guildmaster have in store- just what was so important that he had to pull Shirou off a quest for it?

* * *

"So, Shirou." The guildmaster set down his cup and stared into Emiya's eyes in his own intense gaze. "What do you think of my guild?"

Shirou gulped and sat up. His eyes flickered as he idly moved his stirring teaspoon. "I think it's great," he said, finally. "Everyone here seems to have their own drives, their own dreams and wishes." He took a sip from his cup. "Even if Fairy Tail mages are a bit rowdy, they certainly protect their own when they need to. It's the one place that makes me feel at ease," he finished with a tentative smile.

"That's all?"

Makarov crossed his arms. "Shirou, you're not a good liar."

Shirou looked away. "I'm sorry, I guess," he said at length. "I've had a lot on our mind lately." His thoughts drifted to the past few days. His life here had been completely wrecked when he realized that he'd probably never see Saber again, not until his death- and that it was his fault.

Emiya Shirou had never been a fighter. He knew this. Why, then... why did he go head to head against a force he couldn't fight? He wasn't being a hero. He was a coward, a coward who refused to face the fact that he was too weak to be one.

And it'd cost him his most precious friend.

"I've always wanted to be a hero."

Why was he saying this? Makarov didn't need to know that Emiya Shirou wanted to be a hero. He didn't need to know about Emiya Shirou's dream to be one. Heck, it was embarrassing for him to walk around and tell everyone casually about his naive childhood dream. But something in Makarov's serious eyes, as he looked at him, made Shirou want to believe in him. He wanted to believe that Makarov would understand what he meant. He wanted Makarov to know who he was, and why he wasn't exactly... happy.

"I wasn't strong enough."

Thee old man cracked opened an eye at him. "What makes you think that?"

"I was never able to save anyone," Shirou began. "I thought I could, I even staked my life on it- and in the end, I only harmed the one person who was important to me." His thoughts drifted back to Saber, and he laughed, a cold, self-deprecating laugh. "I couldn't even fight a Vulcan on my own. How could I be a hero?"

Makarov's gaze intensified.

"I think you're selling yourself short, my young hero."

Shirou looked askance at him.

"Me? Young hero?" Shirou shook his head. It was ridiculous. How could an eighteen-year-old with literally no specialized skills be a hero? "That's funny," he managed. "I could never be one."

"Emiya Shirou."

The old man leaned forward. "I don't know your past, and I won't ask you about it. But believe me when I say that there's more to a hero than just mere strength alone." He crossed his arms, obviously dissatisfied. "I won't tell you the answer," he decided. "Not because there's no answer to your problem, but because it won't mean anything to you unless you work for it, and understand it on your own. But I can do something for you."

Shirou looked up. For a moment, hope crossed his eyes, but they were swiftly overtaken by his heavy air of cynicism.

"I'm going to an event soon," Makarov revealed. "I think you'll learn a lot from it. Why don't you come with me?"

Shirou looked up uncertainly at the friendly grin on the old man, then at his hand. His mind still lingered in the shadow of Saber's absence; there was nothing, he knew, that could make Emiya Shirou forget his feelings for the King of Knights. But he didn't want to disappoint the affable Guildmaster by turning him down. No, more than anything, Shirou didn't just want to make Makarov happy.

He wanted to be as happy as Makarov was.

"Alright." Shirou broke into a smile. "Where are we headed?"

* * *

-Clover Town, Guildmaster Meeting-

"WOAH!"

Emiya Shirou could feel a tear running down his face as he eyed the giant strawberry pie before him. Sure, Makarov had told him about good food, but this pie was just unbelievable! Golden brown custard glittered upon its immaculate marbled surface, and the little slice he got literally bubbled with melting strawberry jelly, the delectably sweet sauce dripping tantalizingly onto his plate, suffusing his palate with just the slightest fragrance of the sweet fruit…

... an esoteric flavour bomb that exploded forth as the sauce flooded his mouth with rich, fruity goodness.

Oh, boy, if only he could make this! Pastry after mouth-watering pastry floated by in Shirou's head. He just needed to add a little less butter, a bit more sugar... the possibilities were endless!

Shirou could feel his blood pumping. His eyes snapped wildly around, looking for waitresses, cooks, anything, but there wasn't a single one in sight. The poor tracer glanced left and right, shoved wizards aside and even looked out of the door. Man, just where was he? he could feel the sweat beads slowly trickling down the forehead.

There was only one night left, the clock was ticking, and Makarov was nowhere to be found. But no, he had to do something- he couldn't just let such a golden chance to cook slip away like this!

"Man, where's that old man?" he wondered aloud. "Come to think of it, I did see him a while ago..."

Ah, yes! Shirou realized with an ecstatic grin. He'd seen Makarov just a while back, dunking one mug after another with a blonde man in a wizard hat- a certain Goldmine, if he remembered correctly. Wait, wasn't he standing right there?

"Goldmine!" Shirou rushed forward. "Have you seen-"

A pudgy hand appeared out of nowhere. Suddenly, Shirou found his vision filled with skin. Specifically, sickeningly white, flabby skin, powdered off with makeup and a scent of nauseating perfume that flushed his newfound appetite down the drain.

"Hey, young man, aren't you pretty?" the owner said in a sultry voice(or tried to), and Shirou nearly lost his stomach.

"I'm sorry," Emiya Shirou pleaded. "Now really isn't the time! I need to find old man Makarov-"

"Oh?"

The face of a make-up Buddha popped into view. It took all of Shirou's willpower not to retch.

"So you're one of Makarov's from Fairy Tail, eh?"

Shirou nodded as hard as he could.

"Splendid! I've always wanted one of Fairy Tail's... boys."

The patronizing voice made Shirou want to faint. Thankfully, help came in the form of Quatro Cerberus's guildmaster, Goldmine.

"Ah! Makarov's young apprentice, is it?" Goldmine turned around. "He's out in the woods doing some... research, I think?"

"Research?" Shirou could hear his hopes shattering. "What sort of research?" He shook his head. No, he had to get the recipe, and he had to get it fast! "Thanks, guys, but I really have to go!" He took off as fast as he could, but a hand snapped onto his shoulder and lifted him clean off the floor.

"There's no rush here," Goldmine reassured him. "Come, let's have a talk."

What terrible timing! Shirou's heart slammed away at his chest. Why wouldn't these old Guildmasters just let him go? But each of these old men were powerful, deceptively powerful, and if they didn't want him to go, Shirou knew he wouldn't be able to.

"Alright," he conceded. "I'll stay for a while."

"You youngsters sure are feisty," Goldmine drawled. "But that's youth, right?" He took another whiff off of his cigrattes and flashed a stunning smile. "Free from responsibilities, and free to chase one's own goals. Not quite like the rest of us, stuck in our own worlds and chasing our own goals for a living."

Shirou had to agree. Because Fairy Tail had an abundant armada of budding and freshly matured mages, the atmosphere there was way more boisterous than this guildmaster's meeting. Each Fairy Tail mage was unafraid to paint the guild in their own colours, and together they created a bright, dynamic group.

He glanced around him at the wizards in their robes and wizard hats, chattering civilly among themselves. The civilized air made Fairy Tail look like a zoo. Then again, perhaps it was that wild factor that made Fairy Tail as strong as it was. Because everyone felt strongly about their own goals and motivations, their enthusiasm was contagious, and each of them worked doubly hard toward their passion. Their youthful vigour lent them a momentum that the onset of age had long tarnished.

"I guess it's that youth that keeps Makarov going," he reasoned. He thought briefly of his own stagnant mood, mired in his world of contradictions and regret. It was ironic how old Makarov felt way more alive than he was. "If only I could be as upbeat as him," he said to no one in particular.

"Then maybe I could have saved everyone."

"Ohoho!" the Blue Pegasus guild leader cackled. "It seems we've got a budding hero here!" He tried to drag Shirou into his embrace, but only caught thin air as Shirou leapt over to Goldmine's side.

"You've still got a long way to go, young man," Goldmine consoled him. "Besides, it's not strength that makes a hero, but nobility. People look to a hero to save them not because a hero can do things that other people cannot- but because a hero chooses to do noble things where others would not."

Food for thought, Shirou realized. The words lightened his thoughts, just a bit, but he could definitely feel it. "Thanks, Goldmine-kun," he said slowly. "I think I really needed the talk."

"No problem," Goldmine answered. "If you're looking for Makarov, he's outside the hall, reading a copy of Wizards Weekly."

"Man," the Blue Pegasus guildmaster sulked, as Shirou exited the conference hall. "Makarov's got the eye for pretty boys, doesn't he? If only he'd share some with us."

"Don't bring me into this," Goldmine snarked.

* * *

The forest outside the Guild meeting hall felt unusually creepy. Shirou found himself shivering at every gust of wind, and the rustling leaves and bushes jolted his consciousness more than usual. It wasn't just the night, either- through the thickets, Shirou thought he could feel someone's gaze on him, watching his every move.

He glanced around warily and perked his nose. The last time he'd done this, Rider had appeared out of nowhere, her clogging, sweet blood scent flooding his nostrils as she toyed with him with her chained riding daggers, and-strangely-it was only this revolting smell that had saved him from an untimely death at Rider's hands.

He concentrated, tuning out the regular stench of rotting leaves and the calm scent of forest plants. There, Shirou thought, he could make out just the slightest scent of death, of a decay that slowly turned the mightiest works of humans into decaying ash. He shivered slightly. Had this place, perhaps, been a graveyard once? Maybe there were undead ghosts and zombies traversing this land this very instant, or worse still, Dead Apostles. He vaguely wondered if those existed in Fiore. If they did, though, he'd imagine that they were pretty low on the power scale.

His mind snapped to full alert and he found himself seeing one human-shaped shadow in the woods after another. Most of them ended up being strangely shaped trees, but he could never be too careful, could he? He finally caught side of an impish shadow sitting on a sawed tree trunk, reading a book. If he walked just fast enough, perhaps he could scare the imp before the imp could get to him...

With Monoshizao's blueprint loaded in his circuits, Shirou crept through the undergrowth. The impish figure grew, closer and closer, and then Shirou drew forth the five-foot katana and charged in screaming-

"WOAH! don't scare an old man like this!"

It was Makarov. The guildmaster was standing there, shivering, his magazine tucked away under his arm.

Shirou blinked owlishly at the Guildmaster, wondering if he'd made some sort of mistake.

"I'm sorry for jumping you like this." he bowed tentatively. "Though, Guildmaster, what exactly are you doing in the middle of a forest?"

"Eh?"

It was Makarov's turn to act strange. The old man suddenly stood straight, stuffing a strange-looking magazine behind him. "Well, just doing some research on mages," he said with a pointed cough. Shirou tilted his head, confused. Just what sort of research did his Guildmaster need to do on mages, anyway? It sounded really creepy... not like Shirou actually wanted to know.

"I'm flattered, Makarov."

That killer's aura! Shirou turned his back, but before he could see the newcomer, a sudden agony caught him on his side and sent him sprawling into the ground. He struggled to lift his head. The strange decaying scent was stronger now, a veritable stench of death that emanated from this mage. Just his scythe alone spoke volumes about the man's bloodlust and disregard for human life, to say nothing of those ragged robes that coloured his identity as an assassin. Even the skull-headed flute in his free hand looked ominous.

Shirou's Structural Grasp ran through the strange flute. His eyes widened, and he stared at the mage in disbelief.

"Just what do you think you're doing, Erigor of Eisenwald?" Makarov demanded.

" Oh?" The mage flashed an evil grin. "You've got a good eye, Guildmaster of Fairy Tail. I am surprised that you saw your punishment coming." He stared down at the guildmaster with a malice that made even Shirou stir with emotion. "I've brought Lullaby," he continued in a dangerously soft voice. "I'll kill all of you, and make your pathetic legal guilds regret your pathetic mistake in exiling Eisenwald."

And though Shirou wished it were otherwise, he knew, from the bottom of his heart, that what Erigor had just said was true. Sure, the guildmasters had powerful magic, but not one of them could stop him from playing that flute.

And if he did, not one of them could stop the deaths that would come forth.

Shirou grit his teeth. He had to stop Erigor. He couldn't let him kill people just like this!

"Move aside, _flea_."

Shirou's shoulder exploded in pain again and he crashed back onto the ground. He could see it now, how Erigor was attacking him. There were swords of compressed air surrounding the wind mage, swords that held no substance but wind on them, so that even as fast as he moved Shirou couldn't dodge them. But Erigor himself ignored him, looking only at Makarov with his predatorial glance.

He stared into the sky. It was exactly what he'd expected. The wind mage, Erigor, had never considered him a threat. Just the mildest attack from him incapacitated the young tracer, left him unable to fight.

He would watch, utterly helpless, as Erigor killed everyone. He would rise, again and again, only to be pinned back into the ground by a single blade from the wind mage. What did his efforts matter, anyway? He was never strong enough to save anyone.

 _Save them._

And yet, his dream would not remain silent. He couldn't let himself die, not without doing anything. He may not strong enough to fight Erigor, but he had to do something. He couldn't just let that upstart wind mage go around killing people as if they were nothing. If he did, then there would have been no point to him having been saved once, no point to his life at all.

 _"People look to a hero to save them not because a hero can do things that other people cannot- but because a hero chooses to do noble things where others would not."_

The words popped again into his mind, and Shirou thought of all the people whom he'd met in Fairy Tail. Sure, each of them knew they weren't the strongest mages in the planet, but none of them let it stop them in pursuing their dreams. Even when he trained with Natsu, the Fire mage, knowing that Emiya Shirou could beat him in a single strike, came after him again and again. It was a determination that seemed absurd, even futile, for the ordinary man- a useless emotion, used to push people to invest useless effort in an impossible endeavour.

And yet, just the determination alone was beautiful. Knowing that each and every one of the Fairy Tail Guild fully intended to achieve their dreams and aspirations, no matter the cost...

He wanted to save everyone, but saving everyone was impossible for someone as powerless as he was. And yet, even knowing that he could not achieve his goal, he still wanted to achieve it.

Was the goal itself not beautiful?

Was it not important?

If not, did it matter that he could not achieve it on his own?

It only mattered that he stood up to achieve it, that he gave everything to its success.

He would save his Guildmaster, Shirou thought. He would save all of these Guildmasters. And if he died in the attempt, he would die knowing that he did everything he could!

 _So save them._

"That was all there was to it, huh?"

Shirou stood up. The pain continued to eat away at his shoulder, but he stood straight and eyed the dark mage before him.

"Man, I thought that attack would do more damage than this."

"Oh? The flea refuses to stay down?" Erigor chuckled. "Just how stupid are you, little flea? I can kill you with a snap of my finger, and still you rise to defy me!"

"If you can kill me with a snap of a finger, then do it."

Shirou's voice, cold and determined, rang out through the forest. Makarov, who'd tried to pull him back, looked askance at him.

"Let me handle this."

His voice was ragged, torn from the pain of sustaining two wounds near his chest, but Shirou would not meet his glance. He could not step down, not after he'd found his determination back. He could not let Makarov talk him down, not when he had just one enemy and just one job: to win.

"So you're trying to play the hero?" Erigor mocked. "Let's see how heroic you can be with… this." With a second snap of his finger, another twenty blades materialized before him. The young tracer could feel his intense killing intent roaring through each blade as they shot at him, eager to rend him in pieces.

 _"Trace, ON!"_

The blades fired. Monoshizao burst forth from Shirou's hand, rising to meet each blade before him.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

The long katana in his hands cut beautifully through the air, and he deflected each wind blade dutifully from their impact course with his body. The nameless swordsman he'd projected was guiding him now, years upon years of sword training moving his arms just right so that even the impossibly thin and unwieldy sword in his hands could block every sword launched at him. But it wasn't enough- even with his reinforced arms he could feel each sword knocking him back, straining the blade in his hands.

CRACK!

The final blade slammed into his guard. Shirou skidded, the ground beneath him fractured. It was too much for his traced weapon, and the five-foot katana broke apart, shattered into a million glittering pieces.

The remains of the last blade slammed into his chest, forcing the air out his lungs.

"I guess that concludes the match," Erigor sneered. "Not like you ever stood a chance."

 _"I'm not done yet, Assassin."_

From his tiny crater, Shirou stood up. One hand clutched his chest, and he was hunched over, but Shirou remained standing.

He may not have the strength to match Erigor, but Shirou knew he'd be damned if he gave up this easily.

Damn if he couldn't save anybody, his body yelled. Damn if he couldn't beat this enemy!

"I think you heard me," Erigor smirked. "I said-"

 _"Trace, On!"_

"-You're DONE!"

Their voices overlapped. A second later, they were swallowed.

A giant sigil appeared before Erigor. The air distorted as a titanic gale swirled forth, tearing up the ground in its wake. It rose to the skies, a titanic zephyr of tornadoes, and its cyclone arm charged for the hapless Shirou-

-only it wasn't Shirou anymore, but an empty-eyed teenager with an arm raised in the air, an arm gripping a sword way too heavy for him. The impossible sword in his hands could only be adequately described with the words "Crude" and "Gigantic". And yet, the teenager stood with the incredible weight raised above his head, his intense orange eyes focused only on his enemy, his minds focused solely on slaying him.

Erigor was a wind mage whose strength lay in his ability to knock people back and harm them with the wind. His lack of a solid attack path made it difficult to block all angles of attack, and so he would pummel his enemy with wind from all sides in hopes of overpowering him. A lean swordsman like Sasaki Kojirou could not withstand his assaults even with his immaculate swordsmanship.

Therein lay his weakness. Erigor was a wind mage, in possession of the omnipresent Wind. However, even the strongest winds were nigh useless before an invulnerable warrior. They could not harm a Berserker whose body had been hardened by godlike strength and unearthly trials alike, whose mind did not falter as he cut through the seemingly unstoppable forces before him.

A berserker whose muscular image now replaced Shirou's own body, even as the titanic tornado arm bore down on him!

WHAM!

The howling wind arm struck with the force of a thousand suns. The terrible winds howled around him, tore at his skin and tried to throw him into its paralyzing grasp. And yet, the furious assault paled before the strongest hero, its fierce challenge a paltry trial compared to the impossible tasks he had once faced.

The circuits burned within Shirou. His illusion of strength would last a mere thirty seconds, a tiny advantage. He had to end this, fast. He searched fervently through the memories of the Hercules, from the rigorous lessons that Chiron had put him through, to the thirteen trials that he had to complete, and his mind crossed over Hercules's experience with the Hydra. He called the incredible memory to his mind, and the technique flowed through his arms like an instinctive reflex, as if he'd used it just yesterday.

He stepped forward. The wind battered at him, but it could no longer hold him back. The sword was lowered behind him, ready for his deadliest strike. He had exactly one chance, and he wasn't going to blow it.

In his mind, a hundred nine sword strikes materialized on Erigor's body, reinforced in his mind with the certainty that he would hit the wind mage, no matter the cost. Erigor could probably fly, so Shirou had to walk within leaping distance, until he was close enough that Hercules's powerful leap could catch him before he could fly. A range of about three steps, close enough for him to strike, too far for Erigor to be suspicious.

 _"I am the wielder of my sword."_

He took his first step. The wind mage raised an eyebrow and looked at him, unimpressed. "Requip and Take-over magic, huh." His smirk grew wider. " No matter, youngster. You can't beat me."

A surge of wind blasted forth from his magic sigil, but it swept harmlessly past Shirou and he took his second step, bracing against it.

 _"Its steel is my arm, and my light is its heart."_

"Still not giving up?"

A cluster of wind swords bombarded him, but each of them clattered uselessly off his Traced body, and not one of them pierced his skin. His mind ran through the attack once more, taking aim at each part of the mage- head, shoulders, chest, waist, diaphragm, thigh, wrist, calves.

"Nine Lives-"

The hydra-slaying memory surged through him once more,reminding him of the speed they needed. Amidst the chaos, Shirou took his third step.

Erigor continued to look at him with his dumb smile. In that moment, Shirou looked up into the his eyes. In those orange orbs of his, Erigor saw his death coming.

 **"-Severing Hundred Heads!"**

"Storm Mail!" Erigor yelled. But he was too late!

With a velocity that could only be described as Godspeed, Shirou burst forth from the ground. The teenager hurtled toward Erigor like a rising star, and the giant blade on his arm swung towards his enemy, a cruel weapon that suffered neither escape nor defiance from its victim!

The first three swings fell within a hair's breadth, Erigor's quick reflexes and swift flight having barely saved him. In dodging them,however, he moved into the path of the fourth. He raised his scythe to block, but the axesword cut clean through the magic weapon with a loud "SNAP!" and kept going. Shirou continued in his motion, and his sword tore laughably easily through nascent wind armour that now guarded Erigor's body, batting him around the air like a badminton player juggling hs shuttlecock. Each swing slammed into the wizard with all the weight of the strongest man on Earth and tossed him straight into the next.

Erigor's limp body slammed onto the ground. Shirou followed soon after, his knees striking the dirt with the force of a comet. He glanced back at Erigor and managed a weak smile.

His arms and legs hurt, burned like someone had poured acid through his circuits; his spine pulsed in agony, as if he'd just created a new circuit, and the rest of his body felt sore like he'd contracted a severe case of muscle cramps. Despite all of that, however, Shirou found himself on cloud nine. He glanced back at the unconscious wielder of Lullaby, and then at the cruel flute which lay utterly harmless at his feet.

He'd done it.

Emiya Shirou had saved everyone. Despite being faced with a magus whose power was head and shoulders above his own, Emiya Shirou had beaten back a homicidal villain and saved everyone. It'd cost him all his concentration and ninety-one blows of the Axe-Sword, but he'd even managed to save Erigor by hitting him only with the flat of its blade. Erigor lay behind him, every inch of his body damaged and bruised, but at least he'd gotten out of all of it alive.

People look to a hero to save them not because a hero can do things that other people cannot- but because a hero chooses to do noble things where others would not.

"Thank you, Gold-mine san."

He knew that without the old man's advice, he could never have found the courage to stand up. Thanks to him, Shirou knew that he would strive forever for that Utopia he'd so admired, even if he knew it was beyond reach. It felt strange to him now, knowing that he'd confront every villain he could even if said villain could put him in the dirt with a snap of his finger, but it put a spring in his step and made him feel less empty.

"Shirou! Are you okay?"

Shirou turned to Makarov. The old man had recovered from his gaping stupor, and he was by Shirou's side now, feeling for wounds and broken bones around his body. "That was really reckless," he muttered. "Even though I'm proud of you, you could have died by Erigor's hand at any moment!"

Shirou shrugged. "I'd gladly do it again, Guildmaster. It's my dream."

Tears flowed from the man's eyes. "I'm relieved, Shirou," he managed. "I'm glad you found your answer." He hugged the young tracer, and Shirou found that he couldn't quite suppress his smile. "Say, that 'Trace, On!' thing you do. Is that Requip magic?"

The alarms went off in Shirou's head. Shit! Why did he have to use otherworldly magic in front of Makarov? A dozen explanations rushed into Emiya Shirou's head and his cheeks grew red. He couldn't exactly tell his Guildmaster that he'd died in another world and found himself in-

-wait. "Requip magic?" Shirou looked confusedly at his master. "Come to think of it, Erigor did mention something like that, didn't he?"

"Wait." Makarov sweat-dropped. "You used Requip magic, and you don't know what it is?" At Shirou's confused look, he sighed and began explaining. "Requip magic is a branch of dimensional magic that warrior mages use. They store weapons and tools in another dimension, and when they fight, they draw forth their weapons from these dimensions to do so." He paced the ground. "You're really fast about that Requip just now- I've only seen one person requip so fast in my life, and I've seen a lot of Requip mages."

"Guess I'm talented, huh?" Now it was Shirou's turn to sweatdrop. He didn't need Makarov to know that he had a girlfriend in another dimension, or that he was still lovesick about the Saber back home.

"I'd love to do that again if it helps you know more about it," he offered at length, "but I don't think I have the energy to do that again- even if I have more mana now than I'm used to." It was true. Projecting Hercules, even if it were the Saber version, had drunk up almost all of his reserves and nearly fried his circuits, but more importantly, he couldn't let Makarov realize that he'd actually been projecting Noble Phantasms- weapons that had their place in a different world than Fiore.

 **"Pity."**

The new voice made Shirou's blood run cold. He turned to the flute behind him and gasped. Lullaby's skull was glowing purple, its strands and roots wrapping themselves thightly around his flute. He reached out for the flute, but Makarov pulled him back.

"It's too late!" he yelled.

Shirou stared at the flute, horrified. The flute was bulging now, its arms and appendages swelling out of a body that very rapidly filled his vision- and then the body was gone, and all he could see were the lakes, tall gigantic Roman pillars of warped wood that supported a titan's body. The monstrous skull head rose above the trees, and its three purple eyes stared down at him, catching the young tracer in its deadly gaze.

 **"You would have made for a fine battle,"** it cackled. **"No matter. I will feast on your soul once I've found out what makes it tick."**

Shirou scowled at the flute. His mind raced as he stared at the evil demon standing before him. Gone now was the familiar sense of self-preservation that roped back his hand; the tiny bit of fear and horror that lingered in his mind made him hesitate for no more than a mere second before it was engulfed by the familiar voice in his mind.

A voice that reminded him of why he'd chosen this path, of the golden sword that fended his death off time and time again, before he discovered a means to seize victory for himself.

Emiya Shirou was not a fighter. As a regular human being, he could probably hold the beast back for about three seconds before its hand flattened him like a pancake. No, Emiya Shirou couldn't handle this monster as an eighteen-year-old adolescent.

But Emiya Shirou was more than an eighteen-year-old adolescent. He slayed demons and stopped catastrophes. He held back the tides of war with his twin blades. One white, one black, those empty blades that held no significance on their own gained a role far beyond their purpose in the hands of that red-cloaked swordsman, who lived for a far greater purpose than his own life alone. The purpose eventually claimed him, his insanity, loss and severe trauma doing what millions of guns and legendary swords could not.

For the few decades that the heroic spirit EMIYA had lived through, his existence burned itself into the retinas and minds of those who worked with him. Even if he never achieved his beautiful dream, his memory lived on in the fabric of the world as the saviour whom mankind needed, but never deserved.

Thank goodness, Emiya thought. That annoying counter guardian, that Archer, had appeared before the one person who needed it most- Emiya Shirou himself. More than that, he'd chosen to specialize in SWORDS, and that had lent him the ability to be a SABER. A Saber that Emiya Shirou could trace!

The two swords entered his mind, fresh as the day he'd seen them stop Gae Bolg in the schoolyard. Twin existences, bound inextricably for an eternity as beautiful blades that could not live without each other. Their experience flooded through his limbs, and Archer's history flooded through his mind. Numerous options presented themselves through him, and Archer's cold, calculative matrix took them each apart.

Archer's most powerful magic, Unlimited Blade Works, was unavailable to him. The magnitude of his dream and his self-perception had long shifted. No longer was he the sword, but the hand behind it, the mind who sought actively a better future for everyone. For that reason, their internal worlds differed, and they could not be reconciled in the mere seconds available to him.

 _Trace, On!_

Kanshou and Bakuya burst into his hands. Shirou tossed them immediately, and the twin blades spun in beautiful arcing paths that converged upon the giant titan. They clattered off the tita's skin, but his reinforced eyes caught sight of the grooves they'd left behind in his body. So the flute monster was destructible, Shirou decided. Even if Kanshou and Bakuya couldn't do the job, it would take only one more rank of power to do so.

"I'm disappointed with you, Shirou." The Titan cackled in his mind-numbing voice. "You're making this battle uninteresting- I think I'll start on the meals." His three eyes converged on the Guild hall before him, and a giant magic sigil materialized above his head.

"So he can use his Death Magic even if he's in Titan form? Crap!"

Shirou's eyes snapped to the guild hall.

The guildmasters and meeting attendees had long filed out of the meeting house. They stood behind him now, staring horrified at the giant monster before him and his terrible magic seal. None of them seemed to have the notion that they made an excellent target for the Death Magic Flute's area attack, or that the Titan was trying to cast it. Just how stupid were they?

"Guildmaster!"he shouted. "Get your mates out of here!" He didn't wait for Makarov's anxious assent. For all he knew, the spell had been cast, and there wouldn't be enough time to get them all away.

It was up to him to save them, and he had to do it quick. But how? His mind rushed through his limited arsenal. He needed something that could stop the flute's death magic, its deadly song, before he could produce it-

-or rather, he just needed to destroy the flute before it could do so. That was it, he realized. His job was actually laughably simple when he realized it. It was a job that Emiya Shirou could do!

 _Trace, on!_

 _Spirit and technique-_

A second pair of falchions materialized in his hands, and he tossed them both at the Titan. The monster laughed them off, but his next blueprint was already loaded, the hammer in his head ready to fire.

 _-flawless and firm._

 **"You can't be serious,"** the flute cackled. **"You're still using the same attack? How very stupid of you."** He looked amusedly at the defiant mage and paid no attention to the two swords circling behind him.

 _Our strength rips the mountains._

His hand burst to light. Shirou threw it as hard as it could, and the blade hurtled straight for the chest, ricocheting off the laughing giant's arm. At the same time, Byakuya returned from its arc and struck the gigantic monster in the back.

 **"AAAAARGGGGGGHHH!"** Lullaby cursed, his shrill voice tearing its way through the disraught crowd. He doubled back, his gigantic weight teetering slightly. **"I'll get you back for that-"**

 _Our swords split the water._

Byakuya shot toward the Titan. This time, Lullaby paid proper attention. He left one arm to guard against the white falchion behind him while his other arm raised itself to deflect the black sword. But Shirou was already in action, his arms flinging a third pair of blades into the air-

 _Our names reach the imperial villa._

-blades that tore a terrible groove across the circumference of the giganic flute's chest, even as both of its arms deflected Kanshou and Byakuya from his body!

"Argh! I'll kill you!" The flute was positively angry now, his mouth brightening as he prepared to bring forth the powerful song of death. Shirou leapt, his reinforced legs carrying him well clear of the trees and toward the giant monster's chest. But even if Lullaby was a monster, even if Shirou could only cut miniscule wounds in his body-

 _The two of us cannot hold the heavens together._

-Lullaby could not block all four swords at once!

Kanshou and Byakuya's jagged, giant blades cut a ragged cross through the flute's hollow body. At the same time, their projected counterparts tore through his shoulder blades. Shirou landed heavily on the other end and stepped back, staring at wounded giant monster.

"That thing's still moving!?"

Against all belief, the monster's spell continued, his arms waving around as he prepared to deliver a scream of death. The magic sigil vanished and an unholy light burst forth from his mouth, only to let out an laughable whimper that quickly died down to nothing. Shirou smirked, a lopsided smile playing on his lips. "It seems I've cut enough holes in the flute," he laughed. "Sorry, but you won't be singing anytime soon."

"Curse you!" the monster raged. "How dare you disrupt my lovely song!" He swung a giant fist towards Shirou, but the archer-lookalike rolled easily away as the fist slammed the ground he'd been crouching in. "Fine!" the flute huffed, turning to the crowd behind him. "If I can't kill you, I'll kill them instead!"

Shit!

Shirou reinforced his legs and dashed between the Titan's own, putting himself squarely before Lullaby's lowered skull. The giant flute opened its glowing mouth-

 _"RHO AIAS!"_

Blazes engulfed his body, and his skin blistered under its heat. An amethyst shield of seven layers burst into existence before him, petals of a beautiful flower that channeled his own unshakeable fortitude through its seven layers and diverted the unbearable heat of Lullaby's cursed flames onto his own, frail body. But Emiya Shirou had been through worse than this. The flames were nothing, not when they barely scarred his soul as deeply as Angra Mainyu's own cursed lava. Even if they made his skin blister, even if they burned through the circuits in his arms, even as his mana burned dangerously low against their terrible fury, his shield would hold!

Behind him, Makarov could only stare. The teenager hadn't seemed like much when he'd entered Fairy Tail, and Makarov only knew that he could do some Take-over and Requip magic. But here he was, pulling forth miracle after miracle with his paltry mana to accomplish the impossible tasks before him.

 _"I've always wanted to be a hero."_

The words echoed through Makarov's head, and he stared at the young teenager's body. He could tell that the shield wasn't fully protecting Shirou's body from the flames, only that he was using his own body to hold its integrity together. Yet, against all belief and logic, the teenager stood strong before the inferno-a weak teenager whose heroism flowered before him like a giant shield, defending the guildmasters behind him with all its might!

Just like a hero in the making.

Just who was this teenager? Makarov found himself asking. Just who was Emiya Shirou?

A hero, his subconscious, much to his own disbelief. Just a while ago, the teenager had seemed-no, felt- like an emotional train wreck, and here he was, already a saviour before the gigantic homicidal flute-demon. His form had changed, too. Platinum, spiky hair now covered his head, and his skin glowed with an unhealthy tan. A red, tattered shroud had appeared behind him, a valiant cape now fluttering in the flames behind the budding hero.

 _Trace, on._

The hero's hand burst into light. A second sword appeared, an ivory horn saber whose bone plates covered the length of his blade. The teenager brought it behind his back, his other hand holding up the shield against the torrent of flames.

"You're a monster!" the flute was clearly worried now, his arm swinging around for a second haymaker. But shirou would not stop, not while his mana began burning into his life reserves, not while he could slay the monster before him! With a loud war cry, he jumped onto the flute monster's arm, ducking under the demon's futile effort to swipe away his hand. "Don't you dare run on my body!" He yelled.

Shirou ignored him. He jumped, and the twisted sword plunged itself deep into the skulled flute's head.

 **"CALADBOLG!"**

A brilliant flash burst forth. For a brief moment, the forest around Clover town had been painted white. The shockwave hit him like a freight train, and the a giant red ball of fire engulfed the titan's disfigured body. The last thing he saw through his fading vision was the Titan's headless, chestless body, crashing into the forest before him.

* * *

 _Swords._

 _Before him lay a boundless wasteland of swords. Swords covered the horizons before him, swords that stretched through the endless wasteland. The rust red sky drifted past before him, its thick clouds cracked open by filtered rays of sunlight. He could feel the swords trembling around him now, eagerly awaiting their wielders to draw them forth from the disused ground._

 _Shirou's eyes passed the sword before him. His heart skipped a beat as he noticed the golden crossguard and the blue handle. Once he drew the sword forth, his fate would be decided, and he could never turn back._

 _But from the very moment he'd first traced Caliburn, Emiya Shirou knew exactly what he'd wanted to do. It was only whether he was brave enough to accept the fate so chosen for him._

 _"People look to a hero to save them not because a hero can do things that other people cannot- but because a hero chooses to do noble things where others would not."_

 _And even if Shirou were not strong enough to be a hero yet, he would not be afraid to try. His hand closed around the hilt of Caliburn. As the holy sword left the ground, the other swords drew themselves too, hovering in the air above him. A single grass shoot broke through the iron-soiled ground beneath him, and it began to grow._


	4. Chapter 4

**Disclaimer: I own nothing.**

 **In other news:**

 **It's official. I need a Beta Reader. I need someone who knows Fairy Tail's characters inside out because my research still isn't deep enough to reveal everything I need to know.**

 **In response to the reviews:**

 **I've noticed that a lot of people think of this particular Shirou as a weak one. That's only natural: Emiya Shirou was a huge pushover in the Holy Grail War before he met Saber, even with his Structural Grasp and Reinforcement magic. So in response to that:**

 **I say again, he is NOT weak. Judging him by his inadequate Tsubame Gaeshi is like judging Rider by her chained daggers, or judging Saber by her Invisible Air. Sure, he isn't as hax as UBW Shirou, but you'll see that in some ways he is more powerful than his Rin-paired counterpart.**

 **On Shirou's love for Saber: Saber is going to play a huge part in Shirou's development, even if she doesn't appear in person. That said, my writing on her love is indeed quite crude, so I'll work extra hard on that.**

 **On Fairy Tail Characters' development: it's not fair of me to underwrite Fairy Tail characters like that. I'm still learning, but I'll see if I can flesh them out better through the course of this fanfic. This chapter is an attempt to flesh out the no.2 of the fic, Erza Scarlet. Please review her accuracy, and be honest about it. My writing can't improve if I don't see somewhere to improve on.**

 **Thanks guys for following me so far, and sorry for the ranting. Here's the next installment!**

* * *

"Don't push yourself, Erza!" Gray yelled worriedly from the back seat. The Magic Mover tore its way through the canyons, its rickety wheels shaking the already rickety railroad as it passed. Erza's eyelids grew heavier, and the flickering sea of lacrima that was Clover Town dimmed, but the Requip mage blinked her eyes and kept going. There was a guildmaster's meeting going on there, and Erigor was headed toward it. Every second counted.

"WHOA!" Natsu screamed. Erza looked up, and she cursed.

The shimmering and flickering glitter of Clover Town was briefly masked by a growing silhouette- the shadow of a titanic demon as tall as the mountains itself. In its skull pulsed a single purple light, an evil eye that only spread malice and death alike upon whom its gaze touched- ample evidence that the situation had just worsened beyond her imagination. It seemed that Erigor had already made it to Clover Town, and judging from the wooden demon body towering above the mountain range before her, he'd somehow managed to summon the demon within the satanic flute. If Erigor could get it to play the Song of Death, the entire town would be dead within minutes.

Even now, a giant purple sigil emerged above the titan's head, its intricate and deadly runes covering the sky and bathing the ground in its ominous light.

"Hey!" Gray's usually calm voice was tinged with surprise, and Erza found herself glancing back, only to be set straight as the Magic Mover beneath her buckled. "It looks like the Titan is fighting somebody. Can you see anything?"

Erza looked up. It seem that the Titan wasn't having a nice time, either. It cut short its incantation and flailed its gigantic arms at a person whom they couldn't see, but from its frantic efforts and somewhat frustrated expression, the mage was coping well with the attacks.

 _Phew_ , thought Erza. At least they were puttting up a fight.

Just then, the Titan wound back and plunged its humongous fist into the ground. The explosive haymaker shook the rickety railway and nearly threw the depths of the deep.

Natsu lurched. "I think I'm going to vomit!" The black-hair teenager whipped out his arm. "Ice Make, Silencer!" his hand burst to light, and a glistening white pacifier found its way into the firebreather's protesting mouth. A second later, the same pacifier slammed Gray over the head, only for its wielder to receive a punch to the face.

"What was that for?"

"You started it first!"

"Silence!" Erza roared. The two rowdy mages straightened immediately and gave each other a suffocating hug. Erza ignored both of them, her eyes following only the perilous railroad and the tenuous fight. It seemed that Lullaby had thrown a powerful punch, but Erza noted belatedly that the mage had survived it, as almost immediately two winking dots struck the Titan and left two shallow marks across the Titan's torso as they were deflected. They were spinning blades, Erza realized, as the two dots drew a circle behind the giant.

Another pair of blades shot forth from the forest. Her heart sank at the sight. The spinning falchions had been thrown with considerable power, but Erza had just seen two of the same blades get deflected off of the Titan's body. Perhaps he was losing strength, unable to offer a more powerful strike. Perhaps those four swords were everything he had. Either way, those attacks couldn't hold Lullaby back for much longer. Her time was running out, and she had to get there before the unknown mage faltered and the demon continued his spell-

CLANG!

It was a jarring ring that reverberated forth from the Titan, and even Erza, whose hearing was beginning to weaken with the loss of her energy, could feel it singing through her rickety Mover. Before her disbelieving eyes, the white sword behind the Titan swung back with a force that made her blink again in surprise. Black met white, and the two bladed disks arced behind the Titan, leaving a pair of deep gashes in the demon's side. The giant Lullaby's body lurched under the weight of that strike, and its stumbling legs crashed through the tree canopy in their clumsy attempts to step back.

"Yeah!" Natsu cheered. "Beat that guy! Don't let him harm old man Makarov!"

To think that that second attack, more ineffectual than the first, would cause so much damage! Erza couldn't help but wonder at the sight. For the mage to have revealed this attack, though, he must've been getting desperate. Once the demon knew what had just happened, he would definitely guard against it, and it wouldn't work again, not when he knew exactly what the mage was capable of. That seemed like exactly what the mage was doing, though, as a white blade swished through the canopy toward the giant's narrow waist.

Gray echoed her thoughts. "I don't think that would work a second time-"

It was just as she expected, Lullaby raised its arm to block the ivory-white falchion flying towards its torso. But the falchions weren't as simple as she thought, Erza realized. As if it'd noticed the White sword's furious attack, the black blade spinning away from Lullaby spun from its innocuous path and took a nosedive toward the Titan's exposed back.

"-wait. It actually might!"

Before Erza's disbelieving eyes, the two blades struck the Titan. At the very moment that the white falchion deflected off its bulbous arms, its obsidian counterpart left an ugly gash through the monster's side.

"That was amazing!" Natsu cheered. "How did he do that?"

"Were you even watching!?" Gray snorted. "It seems that the guy fighting Lullaby expected it to ignore the flying blades behind his back, so he made use of the attraction of the two blades to strike the Titan from two different angles simultaneously." He paused thoughtfully. "I'm not sure what he's planning, though. It seems like that's his ace move, and he's going to do it again with the other white blade behind Lullaby, but the Titan's definitely expecting it now." He gushed on intently, as if he'd all but forgotten that they'd been squabbling intensely earlier on.

The mage was doing an excellent job, Erza agreed, but there could only be so many gimmicks the mage could pull before he ran out of energy. Clover Town was getting closer and closer, and she only hoped she'd reach before the mage ran of tricks. Erza redoubled her efforts, and the mover surged toward the station in the distance.

Sure enough, the Titan had caught on. He'd positioned his two spindly arms to prevent the same trick- a trick that the mage had decided to reuse, Erza noted with surprise, as a black arc hurtled toward the Titan and drew the circling white sword toward its disfigured torso. At this rate, Lullaby could easily block both of them and punish him for his predictability.

Just when Erza thought the mage was done for, a third pair of swords tore through the forest, their keen edges spinning rapidly toward the Titan's two flanks. While the Titan's giant palms swatted the first two blades from the sky, the newest pair of razor-edged blades crashed into either side of the Titan!

Erza stared at the circling swords in disbelief. The mage wasn't intent on delaying the Titan, she realized. He was out to slay it! Those mysterious blades that circled the Titan were never meant to kill it in their first strike, but to build up the mage's meagre advantage and deliver strike after devastating strike!

But it wouldn't be enough, Erza knew. Lullaby, being an ancient demon that possessed great power, would cost a fully charged Erza Scarlet a lot of trouble to defeat alone. While the mage using them could no doubt exploit their flexibility by using more finishing moves, they could not hold back an intelligent, durable giant forever. She had to get there before the mage gave way, before his attacks lost effectiveness.

Clover town station appeared behind the mountains, the Titan's image increasing in size with every second. She just had to get there, get in front of the Titan before the mage killed himself slaying it. She blinked the last of her drowsiness away and upped the gear again. The drain was beginning to cut into her reserves, now, but there was no way she'd let that slow her down if there was a life in the balance!

Her eyes turned to the fight, and once again, she nearly crashed her Mover into the mountains. A red-cloaked man had burst out of the tree canopy. His opal armour glinted menacingly with its proud silver gleam, and a sly smirk veiled the steely intensity of his gray eyes. Try as she might, Erza couldn't find anything about him that she could recognize- but those giant, winged swords behind him!

Erza could vaguely tell that they were the very same swords that the Titan had suffered a moment earlier, but now they spanned the entire length of his torso, their feathery mottled blades covered in metal shards like the sharp feathers upon black-and-white wings.

The wings of an angel, Erza thought in her weak delirium. Those wings, evolved giant blades of their unlikely falchion counterparts, painted the story of a man who always punched above his weight. The red-cloaked man would never overcome Lullaby with his strength alone. Even so, the mage gave everything he had, no matter how small, to achieve the victory out of his reach. He engineered each step with the miniscule arsenal that he had, calculated every move, and drew a battle plan that would bring a Titan to its knees. His flawless battle strategy, backed up by the small but defiant arsenal within his grasp, reinforced by the stony determination of the lowly mage to slay the mighty Titan before him, became the wings that carried to him his victory- bladed wings that now joined their flying counterparts and ripped simultaneously through its chest!

"That's Emiya Shirou!" Happy yelled. "I know it doesn't look like him, but I can feel it!"

The mage that was Emiya Shirou burst through the Titan's body. Lullaby roared, gasping at the numerous cuts and tears in its chest. As Erza feared, however, Lullaby wasn't down for the count. His towering frame remained focused on the victims the red-cloaked mage had left behind. The terrible magic sigil above him vanished with an air of finality, and it opened its gaping maw to let out its blood-chilling scream.

Shit!

"Cover your ears!" she yelled, but it was already too late. The song that had gathered within the Titan's musical body was complete. The flute just had to open its mouth to deliver the death blow.

Any moment now, Erza thought, the flute would begin his inevitable song. It would deliver a death blow that would wipe Clover Town clean of all its lives...

The blow never came. Lullaby opened its mouth, but the song that had hummed in its belly only fizzled out before they could even reach its pharynx.

The holes, Erza realized excitedly. The mage hadn't slain the Titan himself, but his determination had cut hole after hole in the giant Titan's body. The song that should've been broadcast through its magic aperture escaped through those gaping gashes! Erza couldn't approve of the mage's suicidal determination, but she had to admit that his strange blades- he was a requip mage too, Erza guessed- had bought them an impossible victory. But even then, the Titan was still moving, still perfectly capable of killing everyone with its fists and its other magicks, and the red-cloaked mage was clearly out of trump cards.

Erza doubled her speed, her mover roared down the tracks. She crossed her fingers as she drove. Please don't let anything happen now, Erza thought with all her might. Don't let him come up with something before I get there!"

The station's gigantic building grew closer with each passing second.

Natsu whistled. "Wait... Lullaby is trying fire magic!"

Gray facepalmed. "You have to tempt fate, don't you Natsu?"

"Stop fighting!" Erza yelled.

" _AYE_!"

Natsu and Gray chirped in unison. Erza ignored both of them, her eyes fixed upon the Titan.

Between the skulled flute's terrible jaws lit a brick-red sigils, with tongues of flames for its runes. Why did this have to happen- and now, of all the times it could've? The red-cloaked mage wasn't Natsu, who was immune to any form of fire. Not all the Guildmasters had fire resistance too, and even those who did... could they really stand up to a giant demon's flames? They'd all be burnt to a crisp! She was already so close, too- her flame armour would have taken it out if she had a few more seconds, but those invaluable seconds would be denied her as Lullaby barbecued every Guildmaster in sight...

" **RHO AIAS**!"

The ground shook under the sheer shock of Lullaby's blasting inferno. Its shock riled up the flimsy Manamobile under Team Natsu, but the triplet ignored it, their gaze ensnared instead by the glorious pink silhouette. Right before Lullaby's eager, flaming torrent a purple shield flowered, its seven tender layers reverberating in harmony as they cast a resonant umbra against the demon's horrid flames. Right before Erza's eyes, Dante's Inferno burst into existence, only to wash harmlessly past Clover Town as they were deflected by the holy ward's valiant light!

"Amazing!" Natsu cheered. "Even after that furious fight with Lullaby, he still has the energy to cast this!?"

He'd voiced it, and Erza knew it all too well. Casting such a shield would cost any mage an arm and a leg. For Shirou to do so, after summoning and using four pairs of blades against the demonic titan Lullaby… there was just no way he could keep this up, not forever. She had to get there, take over before the mage lost all his energy and Lullaby walked over him-

But it was too late. As her Mover entered the train station, as she leapt off with all the strength her exhausted body could muster, Erza saw the red-shrouded figure soaring above the Titan's head. His hands grasped around a spiral-edged sword, his arms raised to plunge its ivory white blade into the Titan's evil eye.

"- **CALADBOLG!** "

The giant explosion cast Clover Station in a dark Silhouette. The mover tumbled before a crushing shockwave. Through eyelids that fought to keep open, against a blast that threw Natsu, Happy and Gray flat against the ground, she could vaguely make out an orange-headed adolescent, shrouded in smoke and steam alike, crashing down on her.

* * *

Makarov looked anxiously at Shirou's bandaged body..

"Take good care of him, Mirajane." The platinum haired girl shared his worried gaze and nodded, and then they left-Mirajane heading toward the kitchen area, Makarov strolling out with an inscrutable expression upon his face. He turned his head at the door. "You too, Erza."

As he left, Erza's gauntlet slammed hard on the table and sent her mug over the counter, where several lucky rats happily slurped up its murky contents.

Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable!

Erza had known that most of the Eisenwald guild would fall easily to her Heaven's Wheel armour. The plate had been designed for crowd control, something that it excelled at. She'd brought along help in the form of two teammates- Gray and Natsu- who'd handled Erigor's lieutenants admirably well. If she'd had the sense to leave just one single person outside the station, her team would've easily stopped Erigor from reaching Clover Town entirely. But no, Erza had ordered both of them after Eisenwald, and before they knew it, the entire team had been trapped in the dark Guildmaster's Wind Prison for several precious hours.

And in that tiny window of time, Erigor had gotten to Clover Town, summoned Lullaby's demonic form (somehow), and nearly gotten her guildmaster killed. She'd seen everything from the railway, from the giant skull-headed titan rearing its head at Clover Town, to the giant explosion that'd removed the Titan's body entirely. And throughout the course of the entire battle, Erza could only make her way wretchedly through the rails toward Clover Town, could only watch the fight as its insurmountable distance kept her from taking over that impossible battle. She'd made the mistake of not bringing an extra mage, even when there had been one handy.

And the cost of her mistake had been Emiya Shirou.

She looked at the Orange-haired adolescent. To say that the poor man had been through a war and a half would've been an understatement. Scratches and scars covered every single inch of his unevenly scorched skin, itself mottled in burnt scraps and scars. The worst of it was shrouded in steam- copious amounts of hot fog that rose from the young mage's body even now as it smouldered like red hot iron dunked in water. His skin burnt to the touch, not a single water bath could cool him down, and there wasn't a single thing Erza could do to get him to wake up. Heck, she didn't even know if he'd ever wake up.

And all of that was thanks to her mistake- Erza's mistake. If she had been there, the Fairy Tail mage called Emiya Shirou would never have had to face the deadly demon on his own. He would never have become- like this…

A gentle knock distracted Erza from her thoughts. She looked up. Mirajane was standing at the door, a concerned expression on her face and a bucket of snowmelt in her arms.

"He's still burning, isn't he?"

Erza nodded. She took the bucket of water from Mirajane's arms. The rag unfolded in her rugged hands, and she eased it slowly across the teenager's ragged skin, slowly and carefully spreading Gray's snow water across the teenager's burning skin. Gray's melted Ice-Make snow steamed off his skin easily, but she persisted, easing the rag carefully throughout the teenager's once-fair skin. As her hands wiped his blemished surface, the red-haired mage glanced curiously at the flame-haired mage. Part of her wanted to berate him for his utter stupidity- just who would risk his life to fight such a monster, knowing that his loss and possible death was on the cards? Sure, he was still alive now, but that had more to do with Erza, Natsu and Gray being just in the right place than it did with him.

Strangely enough, it was her own voice- a deeply buried, and yet disturbingly reminiscent memory- that answered her. There was only one type of person who would devote every ounce of his strength to an endeavour so hopeless, and she knew exactly what it was. After all, She'd done it before. She'd mustered a rebellion against all hope and fought back a dark guild, all for the person whom she loved.

The snowmelt dripped liberally off her hands. The red-haired mage glanced at the unconscious tracer. Very gently- more gently, even, than Erza's hands had been for a long time- she folded the rag in her hands, and laid it on the adolescent's head. The dripping cloth burst to steam, but Erza only replaced it in the bucket and set it back on the mage's head. All the while, her thoughts only lingered on the mysterious teenager. Who was he? Just what was his magic about? And most importantly, why did he try to fight Lullaby, even though he knew that it'd kill him? Her mind tossed restlessly, just as her hands dunked the cloth again and again into the emptying barrel, until fatigue finally claimed her and set her to sleep.

* * *

 _Swords._

 _Swords overrun with grass stuck out beneath his feet. Swords hummed excitedly above his head. Beneath his feet, shrouded by mats of grass and white flowerettes, gleamed blade after discarded blade. Above his head, sword after shining sword hung in the air, humming with barely concealed excitement. Everywhere he looked, Shirou found a sword- many swords- before him, pommels gleaming as if they were trying to invite him, to get his hand around their handles. As he walked, their long and epic histories flowed into him, filled him with the memories of great knights and swordsmen alike, and challenged him to better each and every one of them._

 _Shirou sighed. He was spoiled for choice, wasn't he?_

 _He knew exactly where he'd gotten the image of each swords. When the arrogant King of Heroes had tried to kill him, he'd chosen the single worst method to do so. The resulting sword spam gave Shirou a high-definition view of most, if not all, legendary swords to exist. Equally (un)fortunate was Shirou's amazing structural grasp- which, Shirou thought haplessly, had dutifully and flawlessly copied every one of them into his imaginary world, even if he hadn't consciously realized it at the time. He'd unintentionally flooded his own armoury with more swords than he could use in a lifetime._

 _But he couldn't use all of them, too. His reality, his magic, wasn't exactly like Archers- even though Archer was technically just him in another universe. Sure, his mind had been filled with the piecemeal memories and skills of all the swordsmen he'd projected before, and sure, he could project each and every one of them (if they weren't huge alien Mysteries like Ea), but he couldn't use them. The effect, he knew, would be much like a baboon hammering on a laptop. He simply did not believe in these swordsmen, so he could neither embody their existence, nor reconstruct their otherworldly feats._

 _Then again, even the omnipotent, composed Rin would blow up a lappie in a second._

 _Shirou chuckled at the thought. Come to think of it, the tsundere mage extraordinaire'd left for the Clock Tower right after graduation, and Shirou had been so busy with his life-saving that he hadn't found any time to meet her, at all. It seemed that she hadn't quite lost her temper- Shirou found her writing frequent letters on a particularly annoying blonde Finnish girl who opposed her at every turn- and even dealt her a Suplex when they'd finally come to blows._

 _Shirou vaguely wondered what she'd be like if she had been here instead of him. Knowing her, she'd probably build an empire off her jewels and begin plotting world domination, all in an elegant Tohsaka style._

 _But what if Saber was here?_

 _The world began to shake. Shirou felt his hand tremble. He looked down at it, and the blue-and-red sapphires upon the blade winked back at him. The golden crossguard, the royal lavender handle and the regal inset of Caliburn stared back at him. It hummed eagerly in his hand, a warm presence he'd grown to miss, and for a moment Shirou could imagine the petite blonde standing next to him, admiring the grasslands spread before them with those candid emerald eyes._

 _And as he turned to meet her gaze, a giant axesword filled his vision._

* * *

Erza stirred. Her stiff limbs creaked to life. She brushed aside her long hair and looked up at the orange-haired teenager through sleepy eyes. His head lolled slightly to one side, and his eyes creaked open.

Emiya Shirou was awake.

Emiya Shirou was awake!

Suddenly, Erza was wide awake too.

Her hand rocketed to Emiya Shirou's forehead.

He wasn't burning anymore. His forehead remained cool, drenched in Gray's icewater and sweat. Erza sighed.

"So you're finally awake, Emiya Shirou."

"Saber?"

Erza's eyes snapped round. She stared blankly at him. Shirou stared back, his eyes as wide as an owl.

"Wait, who are you?" the teenager asked. "You're wearing armour, but I'm pretty sure you aren't Saber..." He scratched his head. "Oh, right. I'm not in Fuyuki city anymore, am I? Huh, so being slashed by Berserker again was all just a dream..."

"Saber? Berserker? Fuyuki?" Erza scratched her head. As far as she could guess, they were probably all pseudonyms for people with different skills and roles, and Fuyuki was probably some place in Earthland-though she'd never heard of the place before-wait, did he just refer to her as Saber? "Did you get hit in the head, Shirou?" Erza continued. "I've never heard any of those names before. They're not from Fiore, are they?"

A startled look crossed Shirou's face. Erza almost didn't notice it before Shirou's apologetic smile replaced it. "Sorry. It's just that I've never seen you before..."

Right. He hadn't even seen her before, had he?

She broke into a comforting smile. "I'm Erza. Erza Scarlet."

"Erza... Scarlet?" Shirou wondered. "Hmm, Makarov did mention you before. Though," he offered a gentle smile. "I don't see why he thinks you're so bad."

He made to get out of bed, but Erza was there before him. "You shouldn't get up so soon," she chided. Gently, but firmly, she nudged the seemingly injured boy back into bed. Shirou blinked owlishly at the hand on her chest, and then at Erza, who only pulled the blanket around him. Shirou glanced up at her. While Erza kept a stern look on her face, her eyes mellowed as she tended to him, and her hands handled his bedsheets gently. "You're not fully recovered. If you want to do something, leave it to us." For Erza to care so much about him, a guild member she'd never met before... Shirou had to admit, she was very impressive indeed.

Still, she didn't know anything about Shirou. She didn't know about the legendary sheath embedded in his body, and she didn't know the sword that he held, that told Emiya Shirou to get up from his bed. He wouldn't let Saber keep him in bed when he had a Holy Grail War to stop, and he wouldn't let Erza keep him in bed even if she thought it was best for him.

Before he knew it, Shirou had grabbed Erza's hand. Gently, but firmly, he moved it aside. With just as much care as Erza herself had had, Shirou lifted the bedsheets, got up from bed, and sat beside the armoured mage. He turned, and met Erza's shock with a determined grin. "I appreciate your care, Erza, but I can't accept it. I can't afford to waste a single moment lying down like this." He took off his shirt. "See? I'm fully healed." Sure enough, the bruises in his shoulder, where Erigor had hit him thrice in a row, had vanished. His skin was mottled no longer. Aside from a somewhat deep tan on his arms and his face, there was almost no sign that he'd even fought Lullaby the previous night.

Erza studied him. "You think you're already okay? Then I guess I won't stop you. You are a powerful mage, after all." She offered a hand; Shirou accepted it gratefully. "Though, I am surprised that I have never heard of you before. Are you the apprentice of some summer mage? Or, perhaps..." Shirou felt a chill down his spine as Erza glanced over him again. "You're from another world..." The room temperature dropped a few degrees, and Erza was very sure it had nothing to do with Gray's snowmelt bucket next to her. "Either way," she continued to the suspicious tracer, "It's nice to meet you."

Shirou couldn't help shaking the feeling that Erza knew something, but now wasn't the time to ask. "It's nice to meet you too, Erza-san," he replied in kind. "Thanks for treating me back to health, too." He looked at the bucket next to Erza. "You guys put a lot of effort in, didn't you? man, even the water is different. It feels so refreshing."

"It's Gray's magic. He used his Ice Make magic to make fine snowflakes, which we then left to melt." Erza whistled. "Consider yourself lucky. Not many people get that treatment from Gray."

"Ice make Magic? So Gray's an ice magician." Shirou looked up. "Come to think of it, I heard Mirajane mention something about Gray, Natsu and you being the strongest team in Fairy Tail." His gaze hardened. "There's something I want to know, Erza… why did Mirajane say that?"

Erza turned to Shirou, orange eyes met brown, and steel met steel.

To Erza, it was as if she'd laid eyes upon a graveyard. The perilous grassland before her were littered with swords. Swords stuck out of the ground, like so many makeshift grave markers for nameless warriors. Swords hung in the air, their unmoving forms pointed toward her, deathbringers proclaiming their very next victim. She was a weaponmaster, but the very moment she laid eyes on these swords, she could almost feel it immediately- that _none_ of these swords could be hers to wield.

To Shirou, the deadly eye before him struck trepidation into his heart. His magic circuits froze over, his skin felt cold, and he could feel his arms and legs shivering as his blood vessels frantically pumped shot after adrenaline shot into their quivering forms. It was like staring into the striking at the spiked armour of a barbarian warrior- just the wicked barbs all over the steel plate threatened to **break** any sword that dared to come near it.

A shiver ran down both their spines.

"I'm not answering that question," Erza snapped. "I'm a busy person, and since you're recovered, I'll take my leave."

She gave a suspicious, sidelong glance at the boy on the bed. _You're dangerous_ , she thought, as she strode out of the door. _I can't trust you. I'm not going to let you run free in the guild like this, not until I find out just what you're up to._

As Erza left, Shirou found himself staring into his hands. That brief vision still made his hand tremble uncomfortably. It felt like a serious case of dyslexia- like he'd just opened a Japanese book and found all the characters scrambling themselves right before his eyes. It was something that he should have understood easily on sight, with his Structural Grasp no less, and yet every attempt he made to understand just who she was ran straight into a brick wall. Perhaps it was because they were miles apart, different people with polar views on how life should be lived, whose very nature clashed with each other at every chance they had.

Or maybe, just maybe, it was because even he could not understand a person who was just like himself. Either way, he would find out.

 _Well, a hero can't lie in bed all day long_. Shirou left the bed and walked out. The guild hall before him was practically empty, the jobs request board packed full of jobs of all types, and Shirou knew exactly what type he'd be aiming for. _I'm going to become a hero of justice, and I'm going to start now._ His eyes scanned the job board…

"Wanted! A team of heroic mages to take out a Dark Guild and rescue their captives! Meet at Oshibana Town for details."

Exactly what he had been looking for.

The reward may have been a paltry twenty thousand jewels, but there were lives hanging on the balance. There were people who needed saving, people who needed a hero of justice, and as a person who aspired to save everyone, he could not give up on them.

He tore the job request off the board-

"Wait."

-and froze.

The metal-gloved hand on his shoulder jarred him. He turned expectantly, only to be met by Erza's scarlet mane and plain Heart Kreuz armour. A startled expression crossed his face, swiftly replaced by stoic eyes and thin lips.

"Erza Scarlet." The name tumbled awkwardly off his lips; his tongue protested as its impulsive response vanished into the depths of his voice box. "You have something for me?" His shoulder trembled under Erza's strength. The burning smell of freshly forged steel flooded his nostrils. Her distrustful gaze burnt into his eyes, and Shirou knew that Erza would not let him go.

"Hey, if it's about my injury, you don't need to worry. I'm definitely well enough to go on a quest."

He loaded Monoshizao's circuits, and materialized the firing hammer in his mind. Sure, Erza was not a mage whom Return of the Swallow could easily destroy, but even a swordswoman as masterful as Saber would hesitate before such a deadly technique, and all he needed was a moment of hesitation to begin his quest.

Erza kept her deadly gaze focused on him. "You're going on a quest alone, Emiya Shirou? I believe that the request specifically said a 'team', and not an individual." Her glare deepened. "Just what are you up to?" She redoubled her hold on the strange mage's shoulder. The kid was preparing something, Erza knew. He had the look of a cornered beast in his eyes. His shoulder was trembling under her viselike grip. But Erza was resolved; until she knew exactly what Emiya Shirou was up to, he wouldn't be going anywhere.

The Guild hall dropped a few degrees. Even the old-timers turned over and glanced at the two mages, as they scowled at each other in silence.

Makarov felt a sense of dread incoming. Surely Erza and Shirou didn't mean to destroy the guild hall!? Repairing that building after each fight cost a fortune, and he hadn't counted all the lawsuits he had had to fight for his guild members' violence! He could feel a giant sweat drop squeezing uneasily out of his forehead.

"Hey, Erza, Shirou!" Mirajane called out cheerfully. "If you both want to go on the quest so eagerly, why don't you both go?"

Well…

It wasn't that Shirou had issues with Erza going with him. From what Makarov had told him, Erza Scarlet was quite the reputable mage. Since he obviously didn't know who he'd be up against, and how many, having a valuable ally would likely increase their chances of victory. Well, that was if he could trust Erza to protect the lives at stake, but given what he'd seen of Erza's care for him...

"… I guess we could form a team," Shirou suggested hesitantly. "Erza Scarlet, would you like to come along?"

Erza raised an eyebrow, first at the affable Mirajane, then at the orange-headed adolescent. "I don't think there's a problem," she replied. "With you injured already, you'll definitely need some help." It was the perfect excuse. While they carried out their quest, Erza Scarlet would get an incredible view of Shirou's magic and of his motivations. She would finally find out what made this dangerous mage tick. If he tried anything funny, Erza Scarlet herself would be there to stop it.

"It's settled, then." The two of them shook hands tentatively, but with their eyes intently focused on each other, none of them noticed the loud thud behind them.

"Hey, Guildmaster~!" Mirajane ran cheerfully toward the bar. "I present to you, the strongest team of Fairy Tail- eh, Master, where are you?"

"He's not on the table?" Erza wondered. Shirou turned and scanned the guild hall. Indeed, Makarov was nowhere to be found, though he could've sworn the old man was sitting on the bar table just now-

Wait. What was that colourless thing behind the bar table? Shirou and Erza stretched over the bar table and stared down. Sure enough, there lay their Guildmaster, and for some reason- he was out cold?

"Guildmaster!" Shirou cried. He couldn't find a pulse! "Guildmaster, are you alright?"


	5. Chapter 5

**Writer Comments:**

 **Phew! This particular piece took a while longer than I expected. I must admit, my Beta is doing an excellent job with this story. It helps to have someone to spot the loopholes and correct my (rather frequent, admittedly). Eldest Tempest, you have my deepest thanks!**

 **Anyways, if you're reading this, thanks for following this story so closely. It's been a joy to write. I'll only be continuing this in January, though. It seems that my life has finally caught up to my dilettante habits.** **Still, there's a word of things that Shirou (and I) haven't explored yet, and a fight that I really, really want to write, but it'll take time to get to it. So here's a teaser: the only two OCs in the entire story, joining us for this (and maybe the next) chapter, because I couldn't find a match that could go up against (USW) Shirou and Erza at the same time. They're visiting thanks to certain someone's boredom.**

 **To all the of the Shirou supremacists out there, take this: the first, proper glance of USW Shirou's awesomeness! Hah! To everyone else out there, after you enjoy the story, please review! Your honest feedback means a lot to me~**

 **Disclaimer: I own nothing. Except maybe the OCs. But not their magic.**

"So now we're on the same team, huh."

Shirou smiled amiably at his companion. "I figured I'd get to quest with some of Fairy Tail's more powerful mages sometime," he continued, "but now I'm travelling with you, Erza Scarlet… things happen pretty quickly here, don't they?"

Erza waved her hand dismissively. "You're a Requip mage, and I'm a Requip mage. It was bound to happen eventually." She raised her teacup and took a short sip. "Besides, you slayed Lullaby by yourself. It's only natural that I'd want to see your magic up close."

That premonition she'd gotten told her that the flame-haired mage before her had far more to him beneath the surface. Shirou was a dangerous person. Erza needed to know as much about him as she could if he went rogue.

 _You cannot hide everything from me, Shirou Emiya._

Of course, if he ever got out of control, Erza could stop him easily.

Or could she?

Mirajane's words lingered in her ear. "Strongest team", she'd claimed then. Mirajane could be very impulsive sometimes, but her judgement on mages was rarely amiss. What did she mean? Was it, perhaps, that his magic was just more compatible with Erza Scarlet than anyone else in the guild? Or did Mirajane know something about Emiya Shirou that she did not?

Dangerous territory, Erza thought, turning her attention to her luggage. Shirou did slay Lullaby with his own hands. It was still quite the achievement, even if it did give him a skyhigh fever.

Shirou sighed.

He didn't know anything about Fairy Tail's strongest female mage, but for a moment she looked like she was about to stop him on his quest. Still, him and Erza going together on a quest was nothing for old Makarov to knock out over. it wasn't like they were out to destroy a city, and he doubted that Erza's magic could do as much.

Unless that, too, was his own wishful thinking.

The station announcement snapped them both out of their thoughts.

"Oshibana Town!"

"It's time to meet our contact." Shirou stood up.

"Let's go," Erza agreed. "Just wait for me to get the luggage off the back…"

Right. The _luggage._

Shirou fought off an urge to facepalm.

***The Fairy who Could***

"… right."

Their contact, a short, old man in a tuxedo and bowler hat, felt his jaw drop as he glanced at Erza Scarlet. He'd heard rumours about the Queen of Fairies's huge luggage load, but did she have to bring her entire house out!?

He looked askance at her companion, a flame-haired young boy with equally intense orange eyes. Dressed in a black-and-white jacket and a pair of forgettable jeans, the boy didn't look like much, but the village governor knew better than to take him at face value.

Erza glanced expectantly at Shirou, who scratched his head and coughed awkwardly. "Well, my partner has a large wardrobe." He gestured at Erza's veritable caravan of suitcases. Shirou had to travel from place to place to help as many people as possible, which meant travelling light.

Unfortunately, his attempt to convince Erza to do the same ended with them nearly drawing swords on each other.

He'd heard enough from Lucy and Natsu not to do something so stupid again.

"We'll definitely need somewhere to put our luggage before we continue," he added. "I hope you have a room ready."

"Well… about that…We don't have inns anymore. Those bandits have been robbing our caravans since two years ago, and we're lucky to even have a shop open." The governor took off his hat. "There should be enough space for another two beds in my office. I'll be glad to host you."

The caravan robberies explained the mayor's meager quest reward. His confidence felt false, imposed, and it made Shirou feel sorry for the poor old man.

Shirou couldn't bring himself to trouble him any longer.

"It's fine," he answered with a smile.

Or was about to answer, before Erza Scarlet cut him off.

"That'll be very helpful," she agreed eagerly. "I thank you for offering, Governor Bowler. While we travel, you can tell us about the situation." Her gaze focused on the governor. "The part about the dark guild intrigues me."

She remembered almost all of the guild's members being arrested in Oshibana station, but it seemed that Erigor still had pawns running loose in the region.

As they walked toward Bougainvillea village, the governor began explaining. "Bandits have been kidnapping our villagers for three years now. Men, woman or child… they don't seem to care who they took, and they just left after they nabbed them." A tear rolled down his cheek. "Just a week ago, they took my daughter… I don't even know if you're alive, Sera…"

Erza grit her teeth. "The Rune Knights haven't been doing their job, huh."

"The cities have been withdrawing them," the governor wept. "There's been a surge of dark guild activity recently, so they've been tightening security in the city and pulling back their rune knights from the outskirts. We've tried getting magical guilds to help us defend our village, but we can't afford them, not with our caravans being robbed all over the place." He turned to Shirou and Erza. "Please help us, noble mages!"

***The Fairy who Could***

Bougainvillea Village had definitely seen better days.

The town was packed with houses of all shapes and sizes, from simple shophouses that lined the main street, to the terraces and log cabins that circled its outskirts, and the mansions that stood near the center. And yet, wherever they went, Erza and Shirou only saw torn clothes, closed shops, boarded windows and forlorn faces.

"It is to be expected," Erza sighed. "Three years of their caravans being robbed… it's amazing that the town's even survived this long. Still, the Magic Council didn't want to do anything about this?"

"It's more likely that word didn't get out." Shirou studied the road they came through. Shrouded by canyons and mountain ranges, the only entrance to the village was just all too easy to watch and ambush. "The bandits likely have the road watched." He shook his head. "The governor was taking a huge risk, going to Oshibana Town to fetch us like that."

The faces before him wore only ugly expressions. Loss, shock, depression coloured the landscape wherever he went, as the destitute folks wandered through the town and scraped whatever waste could be found, their eyes blank and lips their bloodless lips pulled thin. The village had lost their protectors, and this was what happened. This was why he'd become a hero- so that people didn't have to be like… this. And as long as they suffered, he would keep their suffering in mind, so that he could stop it when it next came.

He burned the scene into his memory, next to the Great Fire of his childhood, and kept walking.

Erza strode behind him, studying the mage as he walked. His intense orange eyes seemed to have lost their focus, staring past the village, past the villagers. She watched as Shirou stopped to pat a disraught child, as he smiled and handed her a wrapped sweet.

She had seen the smile before. She hadn't noticed then, but the smile felt... _fake_. There was no happiness, not even pity, gratitude, or wistfulness in those slightly curled lips. It was the smile of an empty husk.

That blankness troubled her.

What was going on in his head? Was he planning something?

Or had he seen all this before?

She shrugged and kept walking. She would find out, eventually.

***The Fairy who Could***

"So this is the encampment, huh."

Shirou's hand scraped against the sandstone beneath him as he crawled slowly to the cliff edge. He scanned the region beneath him with his prana-reinforced eyes, picking out each bandit and tent with an almost sniper-like accuracy- an ability that he'd gained in his days in the Archery Club, and secretly the reason for his incredible marksmanship then. He'd quit the club eventually because he considered it quite underhanded.

He was saving people now. Any means was fair game.

Four outlook towers spanned the tiny bandit town. Near the north, a bunch of ragtag tents were arranged before a tiny square, where one of the bandits stirred away at a pot of gruel. Judging from its disgusting colour, the food was likely for the prisoners. The bandits themselves enjoyed their pit roast nearer to the gate, which their many Manamobiles had been parked haphazardly, and a three-storey mud barracks overlooked the makeshift parking lot. The bandits themselves sat straight and stared blankly into the pit roast, hands and lips barely twitching in their strange reverie.

He watched, calmly, waited for them to say something. If he applied just enough magic to his senses, his eyes would be sharp enough to lip- read them, and he could gain some valuable information by doing so. For one, he could find out where the captured villagers were.

Bandits were human. They were criminals, who built their lives off of the blood and sweat of others. They also did normal things. They talked. They laughed. They played banjos, practiced their swordplay, and talked smack when food loosened their lips.

These guys didn't even twitch.

He felt a chill down his spine.

An armoured glove closed on his shoulders. "See something?"

"Not really," Shirou replied, relaxing. "I can see thirty bandits in the entire camp. They have a single barracks, several Manamobiles, a cave that looks like it's for mining, four manned watchtowers. If we attack from the main path, there's nowhere to hide. They'll notice us way before we reach the gate."

"We'll take the fast route down, then." A buster sword materialized in Erza's hand. "I can take all of them without much of a problem."

Shirou met her eyes and shook his head. "I don't think that will work."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm missing something." Shirou gestured to the winking fire below the cliff. "I don't know what's wrong, but their camp looks suspicious. They don't have quarters for the prisoners, not even raised mounds where people have been buried recently." He focused on the bandits again. "On top of that, the bandits aren't moving."

"Aren't moving?" Erza's eyes narrowed. "You mean, they aren't talking to each other or doing anything?"

"I mean there's not a single twitch out of them," Shirou replied evenly. "It's possible that they're just on high alert. We could have been spotted entering the village, but that is unlikely." A dark memory flitted through Shirou's eyes. "These guys are sitting stock still. They don't even look like they're breathing."

"These are no simple bandits," Erza agreed. "There's some sort of magic being used. From what you've described, it could be some sort of mind control." Her sword reappeared in her outstretched hand. "We still don't have enough information, though. Unless we go down there and investigate the mine, we won't know what's going on." Without a second word, the red-haired mage leapt off the cliff and skidded down the mountainside.

Shirou suppressed a smile. They were literally worlds apart, but Shirou could still see a bit of Saber in her. Like Saber, Erza didn't hesitate. She leapt straight to the objective once her aim was clear. He watched the bandits as Erza slid down the cliff and rolled into the camp. The night covered her approach well, and when she ducked behind the bandits' mud barracks not a single bandit guard turned.

It wasn't as good an idea as Shirou had thought. After nearly a million bumps on his buttocks, the redhead found himself tossed unceremoniously against the barracks. It was only thanks to Kanshou and Bakuya that he hadn't plummeted to his death. The sharp blades made for excellent brakes on his rocky journey.

"Looks like we're unnoticed," Erza noted, gesturing past the barracks. Firelight danced beyond the corner, where Shirou, guessed, the bandits were oblivious in their dinner.

His instincts told him otherwise.

After the Grail War, Shirou travelled far and wide, saving as many people as he could with his magic and his two hands. Many of these missions were tips from his friend, Rin, who sent him to fight mages with sealing designations. Some of them he defeated, amputating their crest to return it to the clock tower. Most of them, he only escaped with Saber's help.

Fighting them on their home territory was stupid at its best, and suicidal at its worst.

Mages were resesarchers, scholars who explored their field of study by pushing the complex faucets of their magic. They guarded their secrets jealously from intruders, spies and invaders, and conducted espionage and warfare with equal enthusiasm against others of their own kind. Whether it was knowing where their enemies were, or what mysteries they intended to use, no mage worth his salt would give up the tactical advantage of warding their territory.

Now that his senses had recovered, he could smell something strange in the air. The foul stench of rotten meat wafted in his nose, accompanied by a tang he couldn't quite place. Right now, the tangy smell was spread across the camp like a miasma, emanating toward him from all directions.

Whoever it was, their enemy knew that they were here. So why hadn't they swarmed him?

The answer struck him as he looked up.

"Erza!" he yelled. "Above you!"

Even before all the words left his mouth, a dark figure fell from the barracks roof and streaked toward Erza, its hands wrapped around a materializing sword. Erza's own hand burst to light, and the bandit's weapon sparked as it skidded down the length of her Requipped bastard sword. With a brutal swing, Erza sent the bandit careening back into the barracks.

"Thanks for the save, Shirou," Erza replied. Shirou was about to reply when he noticed two more shadows descending upon him.

Their rotten odour flooded Shirou's nostrils as he sidestepped them. They crashed into the ground before him. In the few seconds before they recovered, Archer's black-and-white blades materialized in his hands. The first assailant, a grizzly Caucasian, shoved his face in Shirou's and gave him a full dose of its rotten breath. Shirou only slapped Kanshou across Grizzly's angry face and sent him into the wall. The second, a shaggy- bearded man squeezed past his groaning comrade and tried to attack with his hatchet, but a swing from Byakuya knocked him into the mountainside. The force of the blow cracked the rock and peppered his body with a pile of falling stones. And yet, both of them were already scrambling to their feet, groaning as they hauled themselves onto their feet and prepared to come at him again.

Shirou raised an eyebrow. "I don't think they're normal bandits," he warned.

His blows should've knocked both of them out almost instantly, unless they were mages or had reinforced skin. At the very least, the damage he'd done to them would've kept either one on the ground for quite a while before they could get back to their feet. A quick glance at them only confirmed his suspicions. There were severe bruises below their jaw, where he'd nailed them with his twin swords, and yet neither blow slowed them down.

And then, Shirou caught sight of their eyes.

He felt a chill down his spine.

Both bandits had black eyes, and it wasn't just their pupils. Where the pupils should've ended and the whites should've showed, he could only see a thick obsidian void. The very tangible blackness bled past their eyelids and dripped slowly across their cheeks as both bandits let out animalistic growls and charged at him.

Now he knew why they hadn't been moving. These people were-

"dead already," he could hear Erza saying shakily behind him. "Their bodies are moving, but there's no emotion, no soul in them. It's like someone brought them back from the grave, and filled them with his own… magic…"

"We should put them out of their misery," Shirou answered. He deflected an angry slice with Byakuya and sliced Grizzly's head off, and the marauder's body crumbled into ashes. "It's the least we could do for them." A devastating crosscut later, Shaggy joined his grizzled companion in the dustpile. A third bandit crashed into the ground before him, but Shirou easily evaded his clumsy thrust and cut him from shoulder to waist.

"I guess," he heard Erza sigh. "It's too cruel for them, being puppeted like this."

A faint shadow descended upon him, and he dashed out of the way with reinforced speed. As he deflected the surprise slash with Archer's sword, he heard a deafening cacophony of ringing steel from Erza's end.

"Need help there, Erza?" he asked, plunging Kanshou into the bandit. The figure dropped its sword and vanished before his sword. He instinctively swung Byakuya up, and the black sword split apart the figure behind him before he even noticed its falling form.

An interesting side-effect of his projection, Shirou guessed. Archer's instincts were rubbing off on him faster than he'd expected. He would look into it sometime, when he wasn't busy being cut up by a maniacal bunch of undead bandits.

Now, to see how Erza was doing…

WHAM!

The wheel of swords that surged around Erza was almost too fast to follow. Erza charged into a group of bandits, and the swords blew away each bandit while her two broadswords sliced through the plate armour of their ringleader. When the dust cleared, Erza stood over the pile of disintegrating corpses.

Shirou gaped at her outfit. The scandalously topped armour could only be described as a skirt of swords, interlocking blades forming the plate, wings and greaves. Each blade glimmered eagerly in the sunlight and gave the Fairy Tail mage the look of an angel.

"And there I thought only I could use blades like that," he noted wryly.

"If you have so much time to talk, Shirou, you can spend it on these bandits," she reminded him. "There are more heading behind you."

Shirou turned back to his opponents.

He could tell from their eyes that they were already long gone. They weren't like Dead Apostles, who retained their soul and character after they were infected. Their souls had been robbed and destroyed, replaced with a mindless will to kill. They were dead. He was there to ensure that nobody joined them.

Still, Shirou disliked this work.

These bandits may have been cruel, even evil, to the people around them. They may have brought tears of sorrow and anger to those around. But they would be alive then. If they were alive, he could change their ways. He could save them.

Now, Shirou could only meet their hate-filled eyes with his merciless blade.

Each deadly blow that Kanshou and Byakuya struck, each bandit that disappeared off the world, was one less person who could be threatened by his sword. But if these bandits had been alive, each blow he now dealt would be one more person he couldn't save.

The thought jarred him. In his distraction, a menacing halberd thrust out from the bandit horde. He brought Kanshou up at the last second, deflecting the giant weapon from his vulnerable shoulder. Byakuya raced down its length, neatly decapitating the wielder. Shirou whirled into the resultant ash cloud and cut up the next two bandits. Just as he charged forward, five lances sprung out at once to meet him. He leapt out of their way with a reinforced jump. IN his retreat, one spear charged forward with surprising force and nicked his shin.

Shirou landed. One glance at the wound told him that it was superficial. Nevertheless, it had somehow broken his reinforced skin.

There were at least thirty of these goons. He could beat them without too much effort, but he was still in the territory of another mage. He didn't know what other magicks were at play. One wrong move and his Reinforcement might not save him from a prompt death.

He examined the group before him and noted ruefully that Kanshou and Byakuya were somewhat too short to engage them effectively. As he hesitated, the bandits lurched forward slowly behind their phalanx of spears, driving him steadily into Erza. They ground to a halt as two disks of black and white crashed into them. Kanshou and Byakuya buried themselves in the foremost bandit, and the second freed his spear just in time for Shirou to snap it between two newly traced copies.

Before he could slash the rest into pieces, three winged swords shot past him, impaling each bandit in the ground.

"That's quite the sword style," Erza noted in a curious tone. The winged armour vanished from her body and was replaced by her original Heart Kreuz plate. "I've never seen someone fight in such a suicidal manner before, though your mastery over dual wielding makes up for it."

"I fight to save people." Kanshou and Byakuya burst into motes of light, vanishing before the wind like the ashen remains of Shirou's dead opponents. "Whether I come out alive doesn't matter to me."

Shirou stepped out of the barracks and began walking through the camp. "We have to find the prisoners somehow," he noted. "I thought they'd at least get straw beds, but I'm not seeing even a single mote of life here."

He stopped before the mine shaft and examined the rail cart. The tracks were well-worn, marks of use uncovered by rust. "The carts have been used recently," he noted aloud.

"It seems the bandits were the only ones out here," Erza added, stepping out of the barracks. "But I can clearly feel a spread of magical energy teeming around the camp. The bandits were definitely not acting alone." She stared into the unlit maw of the mine shaft. "The perpetuators must be in this cave."

"And if their workshop is there," Shirou added, "the villagers must be there too." That they were probably being experimented on, and most likely dead, he did not mention. He'd stumbled on that all too often in his time under the Clock Tower.

He wanted to save them. He had to be optimistic, for their sake.

"Trace, on."

They walked into the cavern. Shirou led the way. The flaming sword in his hands cast flickering shadows over the mining tunnel, ghastly silhouettes of terrifying beasts moving around them. The stench of rotting meat, infused with shedded dead skin, fungus and excrement flooded their nostrils like a miasma. Despite the overwhelming smell, he found Erza walking forward, not a hint of hesitation in the clink of her greaves.

Perhaps it was just his sensitivity with magic. Rin had called him a bloodhound before, after all.

"That's an impressive sword," Erza noted.

Shirou nodded vaguely. "It's a famous one."

"That was some good swordplay, too," she continued icily. "Better than what I've seen over the years. Few can down a demon of Zeref with their swords alone."

He nodded listlessly.

"Come to think of it, you never mentioned where you came from, did you?" Erza's footsteps came to a halt. "I've travelled all across Fiore and met many mages across the guilds, but I've never heard of anyone named Shirou Emiya." When Shirou turned, found himself looking at the point of Erza's winged blade. "It isn't every day that a powerful Requip mage I've never even heard of appears out of nowhere, armed with legendary blades, and decides that he wants join Fairy Tail. Just who are you, and what are you up to?"

"Do you really want to bring this up now, Erza?" Shirou shot back lackadaisically.

The requip mage nodded with unforgiving eyes.

Well, he did see this coming.

Shirou hadn't shared his history with anyone, not even Lucy, Natsu or Makarov. He had the bearings of someone who'd seen much tragedy over the years and magic techniques that didn't belong in Fiore. It didn't take a fool to know that he was a dangerous person, perhaps even more dangerous than the trap of the mage they were about to walk into.

"Alright, Erza," he finally said. "Where do you want me to start?"

"How about where you came from?"

"Alright." He stared into the void before him. "Let's talk while we move." Somewhere, in one of the caverns, the captured villagers were being held in the mercy of a vicious necromancer. He wouldn't let this story get in the way of saving them.

Erza nodded, but she took neither her sword nor her eyes off him.

"I came from Fuyuki City."

Erza raised her eyebrow. "That's a city I've never heard of before. You really are from another world, then?"

"Yes."

So she did notice, huh. Shirou had expected as much. A legendary figure like Erza Scarlet, who aced all of her quests no matter teir difficulty, would've been sharp enough to pick up on him. "I came from a planet called Earth. It's probably in a parallel universe, far, far away from here."

"What's it like, being on Earth?"

"Certainly not like Fiore," Shirou said thoughtfully. "Earth has a population of about seven billion people. It has mountains, valleys, lakes, rivers and seas, just like Fiore, but it's very different." He wondered at how he could best describe the difference. "The technology there is much more advanced," he decided at length. "There, people build glass towers hundreds of stories high, fly in metal contraptions called planes, and use powerful handheld devices that can do anything from giving you directions to surfing the net."

"…wow," Erza muttered. It sounded like an amazing world, certainly not the war-torn battlefield she had been expecting. "How about magic, then? If you use magic, surely there are other mages on Earth, right?"

"That's a completely different story, too," he continued. "Magic on Earth isn't exactly like magic in Fiore, You see," he motioned vaguely around him, "Yes, it's true that only some people on Earth can use magic. These people have magic circuits, which allow them to process the ambient energy around them and convert it into prana, which then gives the owner the ability to cast magic."

ERza nodded intently and Shirou continued.

"There's one main difference, though: Magic in Fiore is everywhere in society, but on Earth, it's a secret kept on pain of death. There's a Mage Association that directs research in magic and keeps it a secret from the rest of the world. Specially trained mages called 'Enforcers' wipe out any witnesses of magecraft to keep the word from spreading."

"That's cruel!" Erza said distastefully. "Are human lives so cheap to them?"

"Regretfully so," Shirou agreed with equal animosity. "Mages in my world run on a diminishing supply of magecraft, called 'mysteries'. It isn't infinite, unlike spells in Fiore," he countered Erza's unspoken question. "For example, if I had a mystery of fireballs and I taught it to someone else, my fireballs would halve in strength."

"It doesn't excuse their cruelty," Erza insisted. "They're just as bad as the dark guilds!"

"Worse."

Shirou scowled.

"You know what's the best part? Most mages are researchers, scholars trying to advance their individual branches of Magecraft toward Akasha, the root of all knowledge." He laughed, a hollow chuckle. "They're monsters who would do anything, use anyone as a test subject, just to get to that goal. Most of them wouldn't even bat an eye at dissecting a human alive for their organs."

"…and your Mage's Association," Erza continued hesitantly. Her voice was returning to its usual coldness, but Shirou could still hear the conflict of emotion in it. "they don't do anything to keep their mages in line?"

"Them!" Shirou snorted. "Why would they? They only care about keeping magic secret. Their goal is research, too, and if a mage discovers a discreet way to reach Akasha by harvesting live humans, the Mages' Association would probably encourage it with everything they've got." He clenched his fist.

"I'm not going to let that happen here," he insisted, half to himself. "If the kidnapped villagers are still alive, I'll bring them back to Bougainvillea village. I won't let them die like this."

"… I see."

Awkward silence permeated the air. Shirou walked on uncomfortably, Erza trodding behind him with a gait that spoke volumes.

He was glad that Erza had finished talking. So glad that he felt a little guilty for it, but couldn't find it in himself to feel genuine remorse about Erza's apparent discomfort.

The conversation reminded him of all the mages he'd seen. He'd been to the Clock Tower before. The Mage's Association was his secondary source of information on monsters, demons and other threats to humanity, the main being the Holy Church. Most mages he saw there were mere scholars and students like Rin, people who studied magic intensely but avoided harming other human beings of their own free will. And yet, there were students studying shoulder to shoulder with them, professors discussing Thaumaturgy with them, to whom human lives meant nothing. People who kidnapped, murdered, experimented on human beings just to further their research.

People whose lives were taken away right in front of him. Who cried to him for help, when he, the man who promised to uphold Saber's ideal and become a hero, could not even raise a finger to help them. The protection of the Mages' Association, the powerful mysteries of these mages and his own lack of strength made these human lives a forgone conclusion, just like the bandits he'd killed earlier- no, worse, because those people were innocent, and they had been alive.

He had a wish, a promise to himself that he had to keep. It didn't mean that he had to like Erza for reminding him.

"There's a chamber ahead," Shirou noted. The tunnel's jet black void gave way to an eerie blue glow, emanating from an enlarged chamber toward their left. On their right, a second chamber glowed, filled with an otherworldly hue that formed a spooky gradient in the confined mine shaft. "Scratch that, two chambers. Neither look very friendly."

He inched closer to the purple wall and peered in.

White-Hilt, the flaming sword in his hands, clattered noisily onto the ground. Shirou stumbled back, his hands trembling uncontrollably.

"Shirou." Erza's worried voice barely registered in his distraught mind. "What did you see?"

"Bodies…" his voice trembled. "So… many… bodies…"

He'd glimpsed a large cavern, its ceiling so high that the eerie purple glow couldn't reach its ceiling. But that wasn't what Shirou had focused on. He was looking for villagers, and in that room alone he had seen more villagers than he had ever wanted to.

Shrivelled male corpses lay strewn against the cavern walls. Some of their faces were barely recognizable from the missing posters around Bougainvillea village. Ghoulish bodies of women and children littered the cavern floor, some so dry he could clearly see the emaciated outline of their ribs. And worst of all…

Bodies piled up before him, a mountain of live flesh and bone heaving, shifting and groaning, their incessant shifting powerless before the amethyst magic circle that bound them, siphoning all their power into a purple gem on a pedestal. Beneath the hideous mountain of unclothed sheath, a single girl with unkempt blonde hair and blue eyes reached out to him with her one free hand, blankly echoing the helplessness of all bodies caught within the spell.

"Oni… chan…" her voice was but a lifeless whisper. "... … Save … me…"

"What… is this…" Erza stepped back slowly, a single hand brought to her face. "... This, this spell…"

"Ah, you're finally here."

The cold voice woke Shirou from his reverie. In his reverie, he'd barely noticed the pedestal in the middle of the room or the hooded guy in a black cloak standing upon it. The mysterious figure threw back his hood, revealing a bald old man with eyes as dark as his skin was white, and a well-trimmed beard that blended well with his unnatural pallor.

So he was the one behind all this!

Shirou felt his fingernails bite into his palm. He recognized the magic. A branch of the mystery of Necromancy, that focused on siphoning and manipulating life forces to create familiars, animate corpses and boost one's magic reserves. Its efficiency arose from its cruel methodology, because its use always involved a live human in one way or another. It belonged to his world, not Fiore. Nothing he'd seen in here, not even the leader of Eisenwald, was nearly as bad as this.

"Who are you?" Shirou demanded, his voice dangerously soft.

"Who am I?" the mage before him chortled. "I'd normally say that it's for me to know and you to find out, but as you can see," he waved to the glowing crystal before continuing, "I'm slightly busy at the moment." He grinned, a mysterious and sadistic grin. "Ethan Blackburn, at your service." He gestured grandly at the pile of bodies and offered Shirou a knowing smile.

"I'm just like you, Shirou. I'm harvesting human souls to save the people I love."

"Like me?" Shirou fumed. The image of a gun hammer sprung unbidden into his mind and fired. In seconds, all of his twenty-seven circuits sprung to life. He could feel his arms trembling ever so lightly from the pumping adrenaline and fury within them, blueprint after blueprint charging each of his fingers as he clenched them ever tighter. "You dare to treat these villagers as fodder, and you think you're like me!?"

"He wants you to attack him! Don't fall for it!" Erza shouted, but it was too late. The teenager charged into the room before she could even lay a hand on his shoulder. She tensed, ready to leap after him, but in the last second a tendril of shadow struck at her and she was forced to block it with her sword. The blow forced her onto her knees, and she looked up with narrowed eyes at her new assailant.

"As if the all-capable Morgana would let you hurt Master Blackburn!" the black-haired woman grinned, a crazed, sultry grin as black as the obsidian magic circle bursting forth from her hand. Tendril after shadow tendril struck at Erza, puncturing the ground mere milliseconds after she leapt away from each of them. "I am your opponent… Erza Scarlet!"

Erza tensed. She split another tendril spike with a brutal swing from her claymore, but a second and third swung toward her from behind, barely missing her legs as she leapt up. The shadow tendrils continued their attack, forcing Erza behind her claymore as she attempted to block each of them. The flailing tendrils that missed fractured the mining shaft with crushing force, and the blows that did hit her sword nearly tore it out of her grasp.

"Yet another powerful mage that escaped my attention?" Erza muttered under her breath. "Just how out of touch am I?"

The mage before her only cackled and sent more tendrils from all directions, each one impaling the narrow mining shaft and sealing off from the crazy shadow mage. She cursed as a tendril severed half a strand of her hair.

Damn if this shadow mage wasn't powerful.

She was at a disadvantage, facing this woman in a narrow mining shaft. Where her opponent had power and versatility, Erza would have to compensate with her own agility. For that, she needed space.

With the insane dexterity that only a master gymnast possessed, Erza flipped over and under the shadow stalagmites as they roared past her body and barely made it into the turquoise-lit chamber. She nearly gasped as she saw it.

The turquoise cavern looked exactly like its violet counterpart, complete even with a single pedestal and a glowing turquoise gem upon it. Magic circles plastered the entire cave, each magic glyph and symbol more beautiful and illegible than the last. Where bodies would've lain in heaps, intricate glyphs covered the floor instead, glowing in a strangely harmonious mix of turquoise and blue. The contrast of the purple magic circles against the glowing turquoise gem only made the entire chamber look more bizarre.

If the two chambers were identical, why have two of them in the first place? Why were the rooms so alike, down even to the gem pedestals and the precious stones upon them? More importantly, what purpose did these gems serve?

Just what was going on here?

"Where do you think you're going?"

Her train of thought derailed as a leg with a full-length black stocking crashed into her sword. Erza grit her teeth behind the surprised attack, nearly losing her footing on the crumbling stones beneath. The black-clothed woman's body appeared from the shadows, her stunning features scrunched in wild glee.

"I'm your opponent, remember?"

She forced Erza back with mind numbing ease. Erza swung, but the woman danced away easily from her swings with a catlike grace that made even her skilful blows look clumsy. Erza huffed and swapped in her claymore for a spear. The long shaft allowed her to bat aside the frequent shadow pillars and close the vast distance between her and Morgana.

"I've got you now!"

She shot forward, her impressive strength borne in the tip of her spear…

 **CRASH!**

Bone flakes scattered around Shirou's widening eyes as Kanshou and Byakuya bit into a wall of interlocking bones.

"My dear amateur," the old man sneered. "We were having a civil conversation just now, were we not? Did you have to resort to violence?" At his command, several shards of bone materialized in the air and shot toward him. "And here I thought we could resolve matters peacefully."

"As if you and I have anything to talk about!"

Magic surged into Shirou's legs and propelled him well into the air. Most of the bone shards plunged past the space he'd been in earlier; those that got near the redhead were dispatched handily with a whirl of his black-and-white blades. A brief moment of surprise hit him, soon to be replaced by his overwhelming anger. "Using humans as experiments…."

His anger surged, more and more of Archer's skills bleeding into his two-sword style as he slapped the flying bone swords aside. His Structural Analysis told him exactly where these bones came from, and the hideous information made him sick and angry. As the bone wall disassembled and shot its pieces toward him, he charged forward, reinforced legs carrying him past the limits of human speed.

"…desecrating the bodies of the departed!"

As he dived headlong into the storm of bones, Kanshou and Byakuya flashed around him in a relentless dance. The instincts that Archer gained painstakingly over the years burned themselves into his mind, singling out the projectiles that would hit him from those which would not. The shards raced toward him with insane momentum, and with equally insane speed and fury he batted them aside and kept charging.

"Oh?" the mage mused innocently. "Are you talking about all these men and women you couldn't save?"

Creature after creature burst from the ground. Ghouls and dead bodies moved into his way, their bone weapons raised to stop his angry advance. The sight only filled Shirou with more horror, and he could feel his anger searing through his roaring circuits, burning more and more of Archer's incredible ability into his arms.

"Wanton killing!"

The mage stared back with annoying, self-righteous eyes, and every fibre of Shirou's being screamed at him to cut the ruthless monster down. He would kill this monster, here and now. He would stop this senseless loss of lives at the hands of this crazy mage, whose cruel actions could only bring harm and death to the world of Fiore!

"You MONSTER!"

He would save them from this evil!

Zombie after zombie raced toward him, weapons at the ready, but their bone swords were no match for the tornado that was Kanshou and Byakuya. Shirou's arms whirled in a beautiful and deadly dance, spilling black blood and ash with every step he took toward the cruel mage. Amid the storm of clawing hands, smoking flesh, ashy remains and raining black blood, the evil man's devilish figure drew closer and closer, until Kanshou and Byakuya swung toward the black mage's exposed neck…

"…Onii-Chan?"

His body swung on his hips, his blades continued their deadly path, but Shirou's anger vanished in a sudden whiff of surprise. Right in front of him, between the neck of the smirking bastard and the sharp edges of his twin swords, the glassy-eyed girl with messy blonde hair and emaciated limbs stared right back at him.

And yet part of his mind, the nerves upon which Archer's incredible skill and utilitarian mindset had been inscribed, actually willed him to go forward.

Just this one death, it urged.

It would be fine if the girl died with this monster. As long as the mastermind was dead, the rest of the village would be saved from their untimely demise. No one would ever have to die at the hands of this evil bastard. If the masses could be saved, one life was a worthy sacrifice…

…right?

 _Iamtheboneofmysword_

 **WHAM!**

It wasn't every day that Erza got beaten at her own game.

Erza prided herself on her skill with Requip. She was among the fastest Requippers, the few who could swap weapons at the blink of an eye and in the middle of combat no less. That versatility in combat, coupled with her incredible skills at practically every weapon in her armoury, easily allowed her to reach the combat potential of an S-class mage and curbstomp practically any mage, or group of mages, that stood in her way.

Unlike Erza Scarlet, Morgana had only one branch of magic at her disposal. The problem was Morgana's ridiculous power over that one branch of magic. Where Erza had to swing, thrust and rely on her general martial prowess to attack, Morgana's shadow magic materialized earth-shattering blasts almost instantaneously.

On top of all that powerful magic, she had to have teleportation, too.

The very moment her spear touched- no, Erza corrected bitterly, should have touched Morgana, the sultry mage disappeared in a waft of black smoke and a pillar of sheer obisidian **CRASHED** down on her. The column stopped its descent as Erza brought a spear up against it, but the sheer weight of Morgana's attack left her pinned below the pillar and unable to move.

"Is this all the Fairy Queen has to offer?" Morgana pouted. She shot out her fingers, and five tendrils burst forth from the cavern's shadows toward the trapped Erza. "Even my pinkie's stronger than you, you know."

Just as quickly, Erza notched her spear between the ground and the falling meat grinder. She danced around her weapon, avoiding the tendrils that would have knocked her out. Those that tried to close her escape routes were treated to a brutal cut from her broadsword. As Erza avoided the last tendril, she dashed beneath the pillar and snatched her punished spear from under it, and the shadow pillar fractured the cavern ground for miles apart.

"That nearly broke my spear." Erza's lips curled. "You'll pay for that." The spear vanished, replaced by her traditional winged sword.

"You think you can beat me?" A sly smile appeared on Morgana's lips. "You dodged my killing blow, but that 's just the tip of the iceberg, my dear." Her eyes narrowed on Erza. "Now, let's see if you can deflect THIS!" The last word barely left her mouth when eight shadow tentacles burst out of the ground, arcing toward each of Erza's limbs. They followed Erza in her hasty retreat, refusing to succumb to the mage's brutal counterattacks as they hurtled toward her.

Erza grit her teeth. Morgana was no mage to trifle with. Her default Heart Kreuz armour simply did not cut it against this veritable shadow archon, whose powerful and limitless attacks never ceased. She needed something more flexible, more versatile than a mere weapon. As the eight extraordinarily tough tendrils closed upon Erza, she closed her eyes and focused on her most versatile aspect.

It was time for her to stop holding back.

The tendrils struck home. For a brief moment, Erza's armoured form was obscured by the cloud of dust and rock. Morgana watched the scene lazily from the side, the shadow tendrils lying in wait behind her.

"You're a skilled mage, Morgana." Morgana's eyebrow twitched as Erza stepped out of the dust cloud.

Erza had changed her armour. Gone was the imposing plate cuirass that adorned her opponent. In its place were silver wings, silver plates and a silver top, formed of blades so sharp that merely looking at it made her skin tingle uncomfortably. In each hand was a magnificent sword, a flawless blade complemented by its winged crossguards.

"That's a flashy outfit, Erza." Morgana folded her arms and narrowed her eyes at the Fairy Queen. "Was your armour holding you back?" she teased. "Or did you think, perhaps, that your horrible fashion sense would throw my aim off?" The tendrils behind her struck at Erza, each blow fracturing the wall behind her as she dodged them.

She closed the distance easily, and in seconds her two swords swung toward Morgana, inches away from her neck...

 **WHAM!**

Shirou stared into the burning world before him. A wall of flames tore through the grass shoots upon his ground, papered the gleaming, polished colours of his swords with rust and decay, painted the clouds above him with the crimson colours of rotating gears. It was a graveyard of swords, the very same graveyard he had seen in the first night. A graveyard that he could not bear to lay eyes upon.

And in the middle of it all, he could hear Saber's cold voice in his ear…

 _Is this what you want, Shirou?_

Kanshou and Byakuya evaporated. Their glowing remnants blew past the traumatized kid, and Shirou's hands closed around her tender waist- or rather, they tried to, before a great white chunk of bone burst from the ground and snagged him right below the chin.

Shirou's feet left the ground. His throbbing head floated through its weightless experience, and he crashed onto the floor with equally dizzying force.

"Still a child, I see," the unknown mage gloated beneath his cowl. "You couldn't even sacrifice one life for the safety of the many." He shrugged, turning back to the pedestal. "And here I thought we had something in common." He threw the young girl against the ground.

"What the heck was that!?"

Shirou charged forward. If he got to the girl before the mage could…

Skeletons appeared in the dozens, drawing their claymores, katanas and spears as they put themselves between him and the girl. "You can't stop me with that!" he yelled, trying to breach the wall of skeleton warriors with Kanshou and Byakuya, but the undead soldiers evaded his reinforced swings and nearly impaled him as he tried to burst through.

Shirou cursed. He could still swing his sword, he could still move his legs. There was no way he'd give up just like this!

He threw his weapons at the wall of soldiers. Kanshou and Byakuya shot forth, two bladed discs that tore a swath through the wall. He dived through the opening, freshly traced swords hurtling toward the skeleton in his way…

 **CRASH!**

Erza's blades bit into the rock wall, buried up to their hilt. The shock and sudden realization of her predicament was still fresh on her face as she noticed Morgana's shadow tendrils shooting toward her trapped form. Morgana smirked. She was the crafty one, here. Not even the Fairy Queen could fight her and the shadows at the same time-

Erza pressed the assault. At the same time, Morgana felt as if one-no, five- freight trains had slammed into her gut. The heavy blow forced the breath out of her lungs and threw stars in her eyes. She strained down to see five swords in her stomach.

And then, the pain, the shocking, mind-numbing pain that shot through her back as it slammed against the cavern wall… she craned her neck down painfully to look at Erza How… the heck… had she…

Morgana watched with wide eyes as eight more swords appeared out of nowhere. Each of them flew at her shadows with mind numbing speed, impaling each of them against the other walls of the cavern. Her eyes narrowed as they looked back at Erza, only this time it was the Fairy Tail mage that was smirking and Morgana who was scowling.

"You haven't even touched the tip of this iceberg," was what Erza's smirk seemed to imply. Morgana could feel the blood boiling in her chest as she frothed murderously at the Fairy Tail mage. With a grimace, her body vanished from beneat the impaling swords and rose out of a shadow behind the Fairy Queen.

Erza turned. "So much for a surprise attack," she said, unimpressed.

"I'll kill you!" Morgana yelled.

With a face twisted in fury, the black mage charged forward. The ground behind her tore apart as dozens of shadow tendrils burst forth. She shot towards Erza, a gout of black flame burning in both hands.

Erza stared her down. Behind her, the air rippled, and a hundred swords rolled out.

WHUP!

The cowled mage didn't seem to care. He simply flicked his wrist. At his command, a wall of bone spines burst forth from the ground. The final bone spear decked Shirou before his red-tinged eyes could notice and sent him crumbling back where he'd came.

"Good try, Shirou Emiya, but you can't beat me with that." The mage sneered, grabbed a motionless lump from the ground. "The moment you tried to save this, I knew you couldn't win against me."

"There. Sera, the Mayor's daughter."

The little girl landed on his chest with a soft thump.

"Die with the knowledge of your failure."

Against the dark purple glow, he could make out her traumatized gaze as she stared back at him, the fear that lingered in her blue irises peering out from the wild strands of golden hair across her face.

Shirou knew it all too well. He knew it well because it was a face he'd grown used to seeing so often.

It was the face of every single failure he'd met before. It was the face of the terrified man saddled with an explosive vest, the face of the terrified woman before Mephisto's spear impaled her, the face of the child who'd heard the click of a land mine under his foot.

It was the face of a person about to die.

That face only reminded him of the persons he could not save, no matter how hard he'd tried.

He swore he would never see them again. He would become powerful enough to save everyone, so that no one would have to look at him with that face again, ever. He would do everything he could, so that people would not fight, and the people who cared about them would never have to bear that face.

And for all his efforts, Shirou had failed to prevent this mysterious mage from inflicting that face on this girl.

Shirou hated him.

The way he flippantly tossed the girl, a living, breathing human girl at Shirou like he didn't even care about her life, only made Shirou hate him even more.

But all that hate couldn't change his grudging approval.

The cruel, dastardly, diabolical mage was _right._

Had he chosen to eliminate her along with the evil mage, the villagers would have been saved, immediately. Shirou certainly wouldn't be lying half-dead on the ground like this.

Did he even have the power to save the girl anyway?

When he was young, his father had said the same. Every life that was saved came with a price, a decision not to save someone else instead. The power to save was a limited resource. To use it for everyone who suffered was to stretch it past its limits, where it threatened to fail and get everyone killed instead. Indeed, while Archer did kill some to save others, he did not do it out of his own bloodlust. He only took a life because he could see no other way to keep those he protected alive.

It was his willingness to kill that which threatened lives that had allowed Archer to save so many.

And yet…

His wanton killing was something that Shirou couldn't do.

He'd sworn to save everyone.

Shirou had his limits. He wasn't everywhere at once. There were opponents he couldn't beat and lives he couldn't save without killing. He couldn't save the victims of the Clock Tower's research efforts from its diabolical experiments, certainly not without killing a lot of Enforcers and angry mages along the way. He couldn't reach out beyond the grave and bring back the possessed bandits he'd fought earlier.

But he'd sworn to save everyone. He'd sworn to save Sera.

The fact that he'd sworn to save everyone, the fact that he'd promised Kiritsugu he'd do it, meant something important to him. He was risking his life and removing threats from the world because he didn't want people to die before him. If he was there, able to lift a finger and swing a sword, he couldn't let anyone die before him.

And that included Sera.

It was naïve.

It was immature to expect a sword to remain bloodless, not if he was willing to use it and swing it.

Still, as impossible as it was…

…the dream to save everyone must be _beautiful._

Only that dream could save the little girl in his hands.

It was enough. She was enough.

That her little chest rose and fell, that her eyes fluttered slowly to life on him. It was his dream that would keep her breathing, that would wipe that saddening expression plastered on her face.

And if she could be saved…

… even if it made him a uselessly juvenile boy…

… even if he wasn't strong enough to save everyone before him yet…

… the dream to save everyone could not be a mistake!

He would save this girl, no matter the cost!

"Stay behind me, okay?" he flashed a comforting smile at the young girl in his hands. She opened her eyes and nodded uncertainly. He set her on the stone floor and glanced at the comatose men and women lying in their miserable heap.

There was no time to waste. These men and women were likely so drained that they could not effectively defend themselves. Therefore, if he was to save all of them, he needed to defeat this mage and stop his evil ritual.

Shirou stood up.

"I've wasted enough time on you, boy." the mage groaned. With a wave of his hand, thirty skeletons clawed their way onto ground level. "Tell that kid what it means to grow up, will you?" he snarked. "Oh, and once he's done… kill him, but try not to destroy the head. I want to study his brain once it's over." He returned to the pedestal; the purple mass of groaning bodies continued through its nauseating dance.

Shirou ignored him.

"Trace, on!"

Pointless banter would not allow him to beat this mage. Neither would pointless aggression. In order to overcome this opponent, in order to save the little girl behind him, he had to understand what he was up against. He had to overcome the intelligent skeleton soldiers that barred his way and avoid the mage's formidable bone attacks.

It wasn't enough just to wipe out the skeleton soldiers. Shirou had to decimate them. He had to prove, convincingly, that if the mage didn't focus exclusively on putting him out of the fight, he would ruin the mage's plans all too easily. He had to prove that skeleton soldiers weren't enough to handle him and threaten the lives of his victims at the same time.

He had to force Blackburn's attention on himself.

As long as the mage was thoroughly focused on him, he couldn't carry out the ritual. He couldn't drain the souls of the trapped men and women in the circle.

He could not let Archer's mindset carry him away. Shirou was here to save people, never mind the human shields. If he wanted to save everyone, he could not sacrifice any one to save the many. For that reason, he could not use Kanshou and Byakuya here.

Monoshizao was made for one-on-one combat. While Sasaki Kojiro's skills could definitely fend off multiple opponents with the ideal, unbreakable weapon, the Fishing Pole would not be durable enough for this fight. On top of that, Sasaki Kojiro's experience catered mostly to other sword wielders. The legendary swordsman may have been able to beat off the other weapon wielders with his peerless skill, but Shirou's imitation could not.

"Trigger, _off_!"

What he needed was a knight.

A knight who devoted all of his formidable prowess toward his ideal, toward those under his protection. A knight whose skill with the sword was only matched by his versatility in every weapon, who would not make a single mistake in the battlefield. A knight who went undefeated upon the battlefield, even when he was faced with the King of Heroes, Gilgamesh!

The aria rolled easily off his tongue. In his mind, the firing hammer struck down. Od charged through his arm, filling out his circuits one by one, and the prana that now surged out of them rushed into his projection.

 _Judge the concept of creation._

 _Hypothesise the basic structure._

 _Duplicate the composition material._

 _Imitate the skill of its construction._

 _Sympathise with the experience of its growth._

 _Reproduce the accumulated years._

 _Supersede every step of the process!_

The beautiful sword that materialized in Shirou's hand was not the bejewelled Caliburn of his beloved Saber, not the Spartan black and white of the intertwined Kanshou and Byakuya, not the deceptively thin Monoshizao with its sure-kill technique. There was only one sword that could be so firm, so upright, so persistent before the armies that broke around its blade.

The weapon gleamed eagerly in his hand. He could already feel its history seeping into his limbs, the familiar touch of Lancelot's expertise filling his mind as he mapped and judged the enemies before him. As the closest soldier clattered toward him with its spear, Shirou evaded its deadly thrust and slapped the knight's sword across its face. He stepped forward, neatly evading the swing meant for his back, and the righteous claymore in his hand shattered its ribcage in one explosive stab.

"ARONDIGHT!"

As he swung, Shirou could just barely make out the little girl's cowering form in his vision… and the bony sword coming down on her head.

"HAH!"

The little girl's hair billowed before his second wind. Above her head, Lancelot's indomitable sword split another two skeleton warriors in half. As the other skeleton warriors closed in around him, Shirou swerved around the girl, destroying each approaching skeleton warrior with a precise blow from his sword.

As he cleaved each skeleton apart, Lancelot's knowledge flooded into his limbs, separating his opponents into those who could threaten him and those who could not, mapping the attack angles that each skeleton had on him.

And yet, he wasn't fast enough. With another snap of Blackburn's finger, ten more skeleton warriors clawed their way to the surface. Two of them started drawing arrows and aiming at him, while the other eight reinforced the neat ring of skeleton warriors closing on him. With each five he destroyed, ten more rose to take their place.

He had to be faster.

He had to be more aggressive, to engage more than one opponent at the same time. He had to counter these skeletons' attacks while he took them apart. And to do all of that, he needed more of Lancelot's skill.

As he moved, his five prana-charged circuits surged, fervently mimicking the ancient knight's skill with the sword.

Faster.

Circuits six, seven, eight came to life, bleeding prana as they wrote more of Lancelot into the young boy. As the next skeleton approached him, Arondight crashed neatly into its cranium, At the same time, Shirou's hand slipped around its falling sword and plunged it deep into another's ribcage.

 _Faster._

The thought surged through his neurons. His circuits responded, drawing forth more and more of Lancelot's skills from his traced memories and filling in his own gaps. Three more warriors surged forward. At the same time, Shirou's hands closed around a fallen warrior's spear. He whirled it around in a devastating swing, and the blunt shaft sent the new opponents flying.

Circuits nine, ten and eleven whirred into action.

As he swept aside his next wave of opponents, Shirou's eyes met the empty sockets of more skeletons. A second wave appeared,

If that didn't cut it, then he had to be-

 **Faster!**

The Projected claymore in his hand began to glow and fracture, but Shirou took no notice. His body spun, his sword arm swung, his free arm snatched the weapons of his newly felled foes and plunged them straight into his next opponents. With speed and precision that only Arondight's previous wielder could muster, his mind noticed and deconstructed each incoming attack, and his body moved to take advantage of it.

The prana in his fourteen active magic circuits burned as they wrote Lancelot's every skill and instinct into his mind. Bit by bit, weapon by weapon, day by day, Lancelot's training at the Lake appeared in his memory and materialized in his actions.

 _ **FASTER!**_

Light bled out of the deepening cracks on Arondight , glowing dust swirling along its fracturing blade and wrapping around his body. His arms ached from the effort, and yet his sword tore through Shirou's enemies with a skill he shouldn't have had, his fingers closing around weapons that should've been beyond his reach. The cloud of bone dust rapidly forming around him continued to thicken with each pulverizing strike he hammered home.

Bone spines shot through the closing Skeleton horde, hurtling toward his body with blinding speed and accuracy. Before any of them could hit him, however, Arondight's fractured form stopped them dead in their tracks. He didn't even see the gauntlets that flashed on his arms as he brought each bone spine against his breaking sword.

 _"A Knight does not die with empty hands."_

 **"OVERWRITE!"**

The words leapt unbidden to his lips. The sound of breaking glass struck his ears. The punished, abused weapon in his hand let out one death cry and shattered, and the storm of glowing particles crashed into his skin. As each glowing cloud made contact, he could feel the familiar pain of his circuit creation, the burn of a white-hot steel rod being shoved down his spine.

 _But I'm not done yet!_

His circuits flared up one by one. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, twenty fully active circuits burning as painfully as the Great Fuyuki Fire itself.

He didn't stop moving, didn't stop swinging. His fingers closed on one abandoned weapon after another and swung it at his countless opponents. His purpose, his will to fight had been built with more than just the legendary sword in his hands, hands that tore his next set of weapons from his fallen foes and buried them into the enemies before him.

The Shirou that ripped through his circling opponents' mass with a borrowed sword in each hand could only be described as a "tornado".

 **By this blade, I live, and I save.**

"BLUMENBATT!"

"SHADOW BLITZ!"

Erza's winged swords swung down, dual flashes of white inflicting a cruel crosscut upon their victim. At the same time, Morgana's hands transformed into cruel black spikes, blocking both swords in their devastating swings. Their blow met with such force that the very air blasted away from where they stood, and the ground shook as Morgana's shadow tendrils met Erza's converging swords in midair.

"This is checkmate, Erza," Morgana sneered. Her eyes began to glow purple as she stared at their next victim.

What? She has laser vision too?

"I'll-"

Her mouth froze as she glimpsed Erza's smirk. A split second later, fifty swords slammed into her body and pinned it into the ground.

"Looks like you don't have enough shadows, Morgana," Erza glided smoothly to the pinned woman, both swords lowered in victory. "Your defeat was certain from the moment you- ARGH!"

At that very moment, a shadow tendril slammed into Erza and smashed her against the cavern's other wall. As her effigy wafted away from Erza's pinning swords, Morgana stared down her opponent with a crazed grin.

"How rude of you to interrupt me, Erza Scarlet." As her hand morphed into a black spike, she dove toward the pinned Erza, her numberless shadow blazing behind her charging form. "I'll always beat you. Don't you dare forget about it!"

Time seemed to slow. Erza's eyes widened as the tendrils grew larger and larger, as they closed in on her vulnerable body, their barbed tips poised to impale her through the heart.

 **CRACK!**

With almost mind-numbing accuracy, the decaying spear in Shirou's left hand smashed its way into the Roman Legionnaire's skull. As the undead soldier crumbled, his right swiped the gladius from the skeleton's belt and plunged it into the eye socket of a Samurai thrall. Before their bodies could even touch the ground, the decaying Samurai's katana had found its way into a deceased Viking warrior's ribcage, the wazikashi on his other side impaled on a Greek Spartan's skull.

"You think you can kill me like this?" the mage guffawed from halfway across the cavern. "I must say, your fighting is quite inspirational. You've turned the most benign form of Magecraft into something that even a graduated mage would have trouble with. But…" At the snap of his finger, ten more soldiers crawled out of the ground and joined the ranks of his enemies. "You'll never get me like this. Certainly not without leaving the girl behind."

That was his weakness.

Shirou Emiya (or rather, this Shirou Emiya) was not Archer. He was flawless with a bow, but his magecraft didn't take kindly to it.

The base of their magic was quite similar: a Reality Marble, founded upon affiliated Elements, broken ideals, and a set of spells that most mages didn't deign to practice. They both forged Noble Phantasms, swords that embodied the ideals of Humanity. And yet, a single difference in their respective Origins had changed everything.

Archer's Origin was Sword. Aligned with his element, it made for an unexpectedly low prana cost in Projecting Noble Phantasms, Altering Noble Phantasms, and forging new swords. While his Projections were so faithful to the original that they allowed him to use their original wielders' skills, the ultimate purpose of his projections had been to make swords. It was something that he did in every fight, forging sword after sword and plunging them into his enemies.

His Projection was centered around Gradation Air: the invoking of his swords upon reality.

But Shirou was different.

His alternate lives had incarnate origins.

Therein lay the fundamental difference between them and him.

His Origin was Hero.

The concept of an extraordinary person, who lived, existed solely to save everyone, had been so deeply ingrained upon him that the evolution of his origin had changed. As Avalon gradually nudged his element toward Sword, it had written its identity, the unending pursuit for a distant Utopia, into Shirou's very being.

His Projection was different in nature. Gone was the absurdly low prana cost for tracing swords. In its place, the ceaseless drive to emulate- no, to become a protector manifested. Throwing legendary swords at his opponent became a luxury. Using an altered Sword as an arrow was impossible. In exchange, he could wield each blade in his world with a skill that his alternate selves could only dream of.

He could engage Blackburn in ranged combat, but he had no illusions about who would win.

The only way to beat the mage was up close.

But going up close meant leaving behind the little girl.

The thoughts surged through his mind in quick succession, cost him a precious half-second that would've plunged his plundered Zweihander into a Swiss Pike's shoulder instead of its accompanying footman.

"So here's my proposal." The mage flashed a knowing grin, ugly words rolling off his tongue like sickly sweet Grail sludge. "Leave the girl behind, and cut me down. We both know that you can cover the distance easily." He gestured toward the pile of comatose human bodies in his magic circle. "That way, you'll be able to save these lives."

Shirou snatched the broadsword from the falling footman and split the Pike from shoulder to hip.

That the Sera would inevitably die, hacked apart by merciless grinning skeletons, was left unsaid.

He snatched the lance from the falling spearman and whirled upon his next target, a machete wielder.

It was a very brutal means, but it would satisfy his dream- Archer's dream.

Pike met skull, and skull gave way.

But it was a pointless question.

The machete spun in his hand, a familiar weight that reminded him of Kanshou and Byakuya.

From the very moment that Shirou's eyes had seen Sera suffering, his decision had been made.

It left his hand as abruptly as it had come, buried in another swordsman's pelvis, replaced by a hand-and-a-half sword it had so fervently tried to emulate.

He would save everyone.

The sword took off one undead warrior's head, then another.

He would bring redemption to those who suffered. If they needed his help, then he would personally grant them salvation.

The weapon, exceedingly familiar to Shirou's hand, found itself fending one polearm after another.

Sera needed him.

It slapped aside the blades and speartips, glinting edges that should've bitten Sera half a second ago.

He could not leave her behind.

The sword moved tirelessly, edging itself into the tiniest gaps among its opponents.

Even if the chance of saving her and everyone else was miniscule, he would not give up his hope, nor his pursuit.

It struck true at every turn, relieving the dead of their unearthly duty.

He would to save everyone, no matter the cost.

His circuits burned as his Projection stripped away their prana. His reinforced limbs burned as he stretched them beyond their physical limit. His nerve cortex burned as it analysed, decided, reacted to each attack with almost flawless accuracy. But while all of them weighed heavily on his tolerance for pain, none of them could force him away from the enshrined ideal in his mind.

"If that's how you want it..." Blackburn sighed. With a huge rumble, a giant bone wall erupted from the floor and split the cavern into half, obscuring him from Shirou's view.

They could not compare to the Great Fuyuki Fire, where he had been forced to watch hundreds of people die before his eyes.

Soldier after undead soldier raised their swords against him. Platoon after undead platoon crumbled upon the floor, their weapons stuck upright upon their bodies like so many grave markers. Dozens after dozens of undead blades joined them, glinting from the bodies of the newly risen like so many blades upon an undead plain.

They could not match his trials in the Grail War, where he struggled through Bloodfort Andromeda and put a stop to Shinji's nefarious plans.

It was the opening he had been hoping for. This was the best way to catch the Blackburn's attention. If the black mage thought the wall was unbreakable, Shirou would prove him wrong. His circuits flared easily, replicated the Phantasm in his mind and invoked it upon reality with such flourish that it burnt out four of them at once.

They could not compare to his fight against Gilgamesh.

A rose-tipped spear of the Fae, wielded by the First of the Knights of Prianna. Not blood-red like the cruel and Barbed Spear of Piercing Death, nor Spartan like the unadorned killing machine that was Rhongmyiad. A spear that Lancelot should never have wielded or held before in his hands, but yet felt right at home in Lancelot's hands thanks to his his all-encompassing skill with arms.

 **"GAE!"**

His other arm drew back, warding off the encroaching soldiers. His hip swung with all his bodily strength, his reinforced arm surged forward with every bit of energy left in him. He would bank all of his energy-

 **"DEARG!"**

-on this one shot!

 **CRACK!**

The rough cavern walls shattered easily against Erza's metal wings. The sudden movement caught her off guard as her arms lost their anchor. The obsidian tendril surged against her weakening strength, stopping abruptly above her exposed belly. A second shadow tendril impaled the space where her head had been, burying its spiked tip well into the cavern rock. Her arms gave way, and the shadow tendril buried itself deep into her soft flesh.

Or would have, Erza corrected in her mind, if she hadn't twisted out of its way and let its momentum carry it into the rock. She swung acrobatically onto the tendril and charged toward its owner, dozens of swords materializing behind her back. As Erza headed for what undoubtedly was her real target, two Morgana clones flanked her from each side, magic circles bursting forth from their hands.

As her two swords crashed down on Morgana's own sword-arms, sixteen tendrils snapped toward her back, ready to crucify her upon the cavern wall-

"CIRCLE SWORD!"

-only to be knocked unceremoniously away as a spinning wreath of swords blasted out of Erza's body. Wide-eyed, Morgana swung both arms to deflect the claymores heading for her, leaving her chest wide open. Erza's swords mercilessly bisected her across the front, leaving the effigy to vanish in a puff of smoke. She leapt away as another sixteen tendrils fractured the ground beneath her, only for her own summoned swords to pin them all down.

With a snap of her finger, the sixteen tendrils disappeared, leaving sixteen of Erza's swords buried pointlessly in the rubble. Yet another copy materialized before Erza, her eyes narrowed in a deadly smile.

"Give up already," Erza demanded. "You are not my match."

"Oh?" The three Morganas smiled, the same deadly smile that drove chills up and down her spine. "What makes you think so?"

The first Morgana put her hands on her hips. "You don't hit harder than I do, but it wouldn't be a problem if you were faster. But you aren't either. On top of that," she gestured to her other two copies, "there are more of me than there are of you. I don't see any reason to believe you can win."

As if I'd let you know the reason, Erza noted to herself. If it were so easy, I 'd be dead on the ground already.

She tensed as a second copy spoke up. "I think I know what she's planning," Morgana #2 said with a chirpiness as false as a 2D figure. "She's hoping for her boyfriend to come save her!"

Tch.

"If that's the case, my dear Erza, I'm sorry to burst your little bubble," the third chipped in, mock sympathy dripping from her tongue. "No one goes up against Blackburn-sama and walks out alive."

As much as Erza disliked the shadow mage, she had to admit that Morgana had a point. Erza knew very clearly that Shirou had an upper limit to his power, one that was probably under Erza's own. If Shirou had been up against Morgana, Erza had no lingering doubts about who would've won.

Of course, he wasn't counting on Shirou to save her. She was the Queen of Fairies, and if she needed saving, then Shirou was clearly out of his depth. Morgana was no real match for the Queen of Fairies anyway!

Still, it was a troubling issue. Shirou was up against an opponent tougher than Morgana. Erza needed to end this fight as fast as possible and save her partner before this Blackburn killed him.

"He'll be turned into a walking corpse," Morgana continued, licking her lips at the thought. "A slave for eternity under Blackburn-sama's command! Meanwhile…" her black leather gloves squeaked as her fist closed mercilessly. "I'll squash you like a bug. Isn't that wonderful?"

"Not quite what I had in mind, Morgana. Still," Erza continued with a smirk on her face, "it's nice to know that you still believe in the illusion of victory."

"What are you saying?" Morgana demanded crossly. "I'll have your head in half a second and you know it."

"That's your ego talking. Did you think you were on the same level as me?"

"WHAT!?"

Morgana's furious scream rang in Erza's ears. All three copies charged toward the requip mage, eyes frozen in maniacal fury. Behind them, shadow tendrils rend the ground apart, surging furiously toward the red-headed knight.

And in that moment, Erza knew, Morgana's defeat had been decided.

No matter how powerful a magic double was, it was still another copy, not the original's own body. The owner of all three bodies still had to control them individually, and no matter how good they were at it, there would still be a miniscule time lag between the actions of the original and those of the copy.

Small as the reaction window was, it was a detail that Erza's sharp eyes never missed.

She tensed up as the storm of Shadow Magic approached, sword after sword rolling into existence behind her back. Her twin swords were drawn back, ready for this one opportunity. Against an opponent as slippery as Morgana, she had only one chance to settle this in a clean and simple manner, and she wasn't going to waste it.

Morgana closed in. The thirty paces between them shrunk down to twenty, and then to ten, the woman in the middle slightly faster than the rest. Erza focused on that one: it was her who had leapt at Erza first, her who was most likely the original Morgana.

The ground beneath her feet protested, and Erza sprung off, rocketing toward the copy heading down the middle.

"Trying the same thing again?" Morgana scoffed. "Just how stupid are you?" Her doubles surged forward from each side and swung around, tendrils and blasts circly around to hit Erza in the back. Just as quickly as they had turned, a torrent of swords buried themselves into each copy, pinning all of them mercilessly to the ground.

"Not good enough!" Morgana's crazy grin widened. The tendrils behind her reared up, striking at Erza as she closed like so many missiles arcing toward their prey. Erza ignored them and made a beeline for Morgana instead, swords raised for a devastating strike. As they approached, Erza mouthed a final phrase.

"PENTAGRAM SWORD!"

"You think that's enough?"

Morgana blocked the first slash and the second as Erza surged past her. For a brief moment, the shadow mage smiled, confident in her victory.

At that moment, her stomach erupted in agony. She stared, uncomprehending, as Erza brought her sword around grimly. "Did you think I'd settle for two slashes only, Morgana!?"

"… Five… slashes…!?"

She collapsed into a puff of black smoke.

"Requip!"

Turquoise gave way to bleaching white. For a brief moment, the shadows all over the cavern were replaced with light, the stunning brilliance of her new armour dismissing any and every shadow within the cavern. Morgana's shadow fragments vanished before the aggressive light. Morgana's Shadow Magic relied on the lingering presence of shadows, so if she wiped every single shadow from the cavern, Morgana could not win!

Erza looked around. As far as she could see in the blinding light of her own armour, there was no sight of a silhouette, no sign of the shadow mage in the cavern.

"… you've already failed to kill me, you know?" Morgana's voice echoed, an ominous afterthought in the brilliantly lit cavern.

"It was a good plan, better than what I had expected from you. But…" her voice dipped into a deadly whisper right behind Erza's ear. "It wasn't enough. Because I'm already here."

She shouldn't have missed it. Erza already knew that Morgana could teleport between shadows. The only reason she could replace her doubles almost instantly was that they, too, cast their own shadows. And when Erza Scarlet had put her glowing armour up, a single shadow had been cast.

Erza Scarlet's own shadow.

"Goodbye, Erza Scarlet," Morgana mocked.

"Ditto."

Whatever Morgana was about to do ground to a sparking halt when Erza turned around with impossible speed and slammed a giant club into her midsection. Erza hurtled through the air with Morgana at the business end of her weapon, and the shadow mage met the rocky cavern wall with a force that could only be described as concussive.

It was the straw on the camel's back.

Morgana and Erza's magicks had proven too much for even the tough rock surface, and it had finally decided to give way. Erza's most powerful strike blasted Morgana into the wall and kept going.

CRASH!

Blackburn's expression was priceless.

Whatever he'd been expecting Shirou to do at the other end, it certainly had not involved Shirou bursting through with a rose-coloured spear in one hand and a bone-dusted, but largely unharmed girl wrapped protectively in the other. It had also not involved said rose-tipped spear sailing smoothly into the floating amethyst on the pedestal and shattering it into so many fragments.

It was a sight that brought triumph to Shirou's face, though perhaps not quite as much as the sudden fading of the burdensome rotting smell that signified the end of the binding magic ritual, or the thumping of rolling bodies falling flat as the magic circle under them disappeared.

That triumph lasted for a second before it was overshadowed with fear. An intense fear. Specifically, a bone-chilling, nerve-wracking fear that urged him to run as fast as he could from Ethan Blackburn before the murderous rage coming over his face was manifested in his necromancy. But Shirou was a mage, and while Ethan Blackburn was good at his magic, he wasn't about to let the necromancer run loose against the villagers he'd sworn to protect.

But even he had not expected what would follow.

 **Pain.**

Relentless, merciless **pain** , the _agonizing_ sensation of a _white-hot iron rod_ being inserted into his spine, spread across all of his circuits as they suffered the same fate. **Mind-numbing pain** that accompanied the disorienting vertigo as things that he should've known, things that he had become intimately familiar with vanished from his fracturing mind.

His eyes came back to focus, locked on the jagged purple dagger buried in his arm.

 _Rule Breaker._

"… Sera…?"

Betrayal crept onto his face, only to be washed away as Sera stared back at him through blank, unseeing eyes. Gone was the pitiful look that requested, no, begged him to save her from the dark mage's grasp. Shirou felt a slap across his hazy mind as the mayor's daughter plopped onto the ground and looked at him with a gaze not her own.

He felt his knees crumble under him as Lancelot's vitality and traced skill left him, tasted the gritty dirt upon the cavern floor as his circuits wound down.

"Hypnosis magic."

Blackburn gritted the words out from behind his clenched teeth. Shirou struggled to bring his head up and looked at the necromancer with a gaze of pure hate.

"Don't give me that look," the mage snapped. The anger on his face was definitely genuine, bearing none of the lighthearted amusement from his "friendly" tussle with Shirou. Shirou had wrecked the magic of a lifetime, and Blackburn knew it. "You deserved it. As a matter of fact," he spat, "betrayal is too kind for the likes of you."

"You don't even know you're a hypocrite," Shirou shot back, only for Blackburn to slap him across the face.

"THE HYPOCRITE IS YOU!" the mage roared. "Running around and fighting monsters with those two swords, saving sinful people from their well-deserved deaths… you can't even follow your own dream properly. Every villain you meet," he continued angrily, "is a villain saved from his justly deserved death!"

"As if your wanton killing is any better, Blackburn."

"Don't lump me in with the likes of you," Blackburn said dismissively. "I'm killing all of these people for a just purpose. You see," he continued snidely, "I have a mage under my wing. A bright, young shadow user, so talented in Shadow magic that few of this world could even match her at the art."

"But she suffered from a terrible fate."

Blackburn strode furiously across the hall. "Where other mages could freely use their shadow magic, her own circuits burned her from the inside. They ate at her circuits. They sucked her life force away like a black hole and left her far weaker. But that wasn't enough misfortune, was it?" His voice grew angrier and angrier, until his footsteps cracked the ground in his towering rage. "because she had an ARMY of BLACK MAGES seeking to kill her for her power!"

"And it's fine to kill all those bandits for that cause?" Shirou shot back. Whatever Rule Breaker had done, the effects were reverberating around his own Circuits, wreaking havoc like nothing else.

"They're WORTHLESS!" Blackburn roared. "Of all the opportunistic bastards to hunt my beloved Morgana, they were the first! Their lives are FORFEIT!"

"All of these lives are meant to save her, Emiya Shirou," Blackburn continued. "With so many souls on my hands, I can graft enough circuits onto her. I can save her from her self-consuming magic. I can finally give her the life of a normal shadow mage, able to use her powers without suffering."

"But you, the saviour, stripped all of that away." Blackburn pointed an accusing finger. "You robbed my Morgana of her only chance at life!"

"And you think that her life is worth the lives of so many?" Shirou retorted. "That it's okay for her to live happily ever after, if millions of people have their dreams, their aspirations, their very existences erased for it?"

"What matters their aspirations?" Blackburn demanded. "It's a world where dogs eat each other, Shirou Emiya. The only lives that are worth saving are the ones closest to your heart."

It was a school of thought all too clear to Shirou.

He knew how reality pit his interests against the interests of the many. He knew how he almost forced Saber to consume other human souls, if only so that she could continue to help Shirou in his quest to halt the greater carnage of the Holy Grail War. He knew, from his understanding of Archer's memories, how another version of himself had thrown aside his own ideals so that he could save the one person closest to him, because there simply was no way he could protect them both.

Archer had even said it out loud once, to an alternate of himself that eventually embodied his ideals anyway.

"Saving the many, and saving the individual, are mutually exclusive acts. You can only save one or the other."

"Put him out, Sera," Blackburn commanded. "If these souls will not work, I'll just have to graft this mage's own on circuits onto Morgana."

And yet, Shirou thought, as he watched the jagged dagger in Sera's hand reach toward him, the dream to save everyone was one that he could not give up on. As naïve, as brazen, as ignorant as it was…

… he could not bring himself to believe that the world would not let all of its humans live happily together. No matter how cruel Gaia and Alaya were... no matter how insurmountable the odds were before him…

No matter how mutually exclusive a person's happiness seemed…

… it was human effort, his effort, that created the possibility of making all of them happy.

It was only by becoming stronger, by being more capable, by providing more, that more and more of the general public became happier. Even if happiness was mutually exclusive across many situations, it was an increase in ability that allowed the decision maker to save them both. The promise of power was not equal to the promise of an unconditional wish, but nonetheless, it extended to him the helping hand he needed to create a wonderful world.

A world where no one had to suffer.

Well, he thought helplessly as Sera's knife descended on him, I'll just have to strive for that world in my next life.

"Rejoice," Blackburn intoned mercilessly. "For today, your dream of saving another shall be fulfilled."

His mouth was still open, his tongue about to roll off the incantations he needed, but Blackburn's grand plan of grafting Shirou's circuits ground to a sparking halt.

Because at that exact moment, two things happened.

One of these two things happened first, but they hurried so quickly after each other that the difference in time didn't really matter at all. To Shirou, who lay semi-lifeless on the floor of the cavern with Rule Breaker raised above him, they could've occurred in reverse order as far as he cared and he would have felt no different.

The first was the louder. It involved the cavern wall above Blackburn's head exploding with such force that boulders, rocks and stone shards flew over his head as two gravel-trailing female figures crashed into his field of vision. They descended with such force that he could feel something- a pair of wings, was it?- almost clip his head before his eyes saw the black plated back of their owner, and he could hear the crack of the rock under the other person's leather-clad body as it shattered the pedestal.

Ethan Blackburn had seen many spectacular things in his life as a necromancer. Yet, nowhere among the varied experiences of rising Lich Dragons and Dead Cities could he recall an event as attention-grabbing as this one, not less because the falling rocks would have killed him if his instinctively summoned bone spears had not knocked them aside.

"What the heck is that!?" Blackburn demanded, eyes flickering in confusion.

It was that earthshaking moment that had set the stage for the second event.

Morgana lay on the floor, unmoving. Erza sat above her, battered, tired but clearly satisfied.

"Finally. That blow was strong enough to knock her out for a while, huh…" the redheaded woman muttered. "That makes everything easier."

"…you!" Ethan seethed. In his fury, he failed to see the blonde child approaching his arm with a vicious jagged dagger in hand. Before he knew it, he had found himself staring inexplicably at Rule Breaker as the jagged dagger broke his skin.

"But... I… hypnotized… you…" he managed. His legs wobbled once, and he fell to the ground too.

"You did," Sera replied, hate shooting out from her blue eyes. "You _violated_ me." She continued, fury building in her voice. "You tried to take my _soul_ away. You used my dad's present to hurt this," she pointed at Shirou, "this… no, _my_ hero!"

Neon blue lines flashed across Sera's arms. Her tiny hands trembled as she edged the jagged dagger deeper and deeper into the necromancer's forearm. With each push, each dig, the woman under Erza Scarlett screamed, as if the dagger had been buried not in him but in the woman instead.

"No!" Blackburn's eyes widened. "Don't!" He turned to Shirou with pleading eyes. "Please, Shirou, if you want to save Morgana… please make it stop!"

"HOW COULD YOU!" Sera shouted above them all.

The amethyst glow in the cavern flickered. The woman fell flat on the ground, clearly spent. Sera continued to twist the dagger in Blackburn's arm with an iron grip that even Shirou, in his weakened state, could hardly pry open. "Sera," he tried, moving the tiny fingers off the purple dagger's hilt, but the girl's fingers clamped defiantly back onto the dagger.

"Sera!" He yelled. "Look at me!"

The girl snapped toward him, gratefulness glittering in her eyes.

It was surprising, Shirou mused to himself, just how fast children's emotions could change. But he wasn't here to deal with child psychology. He was here to save people. Now that the villagers were free, he couldn't let Sera harm Blackburn and his apprentice like this.

"Sera," Shirou continued slowly. One word out of line and the situation would be unsalvageable. "Blackburn has killed many people, but it's not right to do this to him." As Sera looked up to him with confused eyes, he asked, "Do you think that killing people is okay?"

"No, but…" Sera looked down. "This bad person has killed many people. If I kill him, he will stop!"

"First of all, you aren't killing anyone with that dagger," Shirou chided gently. "That is a magical dagger, Rule Breaker. It cuts magic contracts and not human flesh. Secondly," he continued, "even if someone has killed before, killing him is not justice. It won't bring anyone back from the dead, and those close to the killed person will only become angry, and they might kill you too and call it justice."

"I don't understand," Sera continued, unsure. "What do you mean?"

"It's quite simple," Shirou continued. "Two wrongs cannot make a right. If you truly care for these people," he continued, gesturing at the corpses over the floor, "then you must give these people a reason not to kill. A reason for everyone to be happy, for no one to have to suffer." He took a deep breath and gave Sera the widest smile he could. "That is what it means to be a hero," he concluded.

Sera nodded uncertainly, and Shirou felt a relieved sigh escape. He let Blackburn's hysterical curse float past his ears.

If he was a hypocrite, Shirou thought, then this must've been one of his greatest offences: saving people who had a history of harming others.

He, unlike Archer, had trouble killing people.

Even if they sinned, stole, killed, Shirou could not take away their one chance at making amends. He could not help but save the people whose situation had forced them into criminality and immorality. He could not bear to deny them salvation from their cruel circumstances. As a hero, he could not deny justice even to those who had strayed from its path.

It was a failing that Archer would no doubt have laughed at: A burden more heavy, perhaps, than even Archer's ideal of saving humanity at the cost of thousands of lives. An impossible naivety that twisted the causes and effects of crime and punishment, his ideal would come back to bite him one day, when he had been forced to kill to save.

But it was his ideal. It was his strength.

He would not stand by a suffering person, kill a suffering person.

A sword that refused to be stained by blood. No, a shining white knight, who refused to have his hands stained by the deaths of others, innocent or not.

"You make me sick," Blackburn chuckled, as he fell back onto the floor, spent. "You're a bigger hypocrite than I thought. I don't need your help."

"It's not your decision anymore, Blackburn," Shirou shot back. "From the moment I chose this path, I swore that I would save everyone."

For a moment, Erza looked him in the eye, her black irises searching for something. Shirou shrugged back, unsure of what to say. As far as he knew, Erza would probably laugh at his naivety and kill Blackburn in his stead, and he would find himself the biggest, most embarrassed hypocrite ever.

But what he saw was not what he had expected. Erza only looked back at him pensively, a brief expression of satisfaction, acceptance, crossing her face as their eyes met. Erza turned down, and shock briefly crossed her face.

"Morgana's hand… it's turning black."

"You mean, like a shadow?" Blackburn asked breathlessly. "Please tell me it's just her shadow magic."

"No," Erza examined Morgana's hand, clearly worried now. "It's different. Her hand is… shrivelling. As if some sort of… death magic… is claiming her life force." She turned vehemently to Blackburn. "Why didn't you even tell anyone about this!? We could have gotten her to heal!"

"No doctor can," Blackburn retorted. "So I tried to save Morgana myself."

"And this is what you came up with!?" Erza gestured angrily at the bodies sprawled throughout the cavern. "Shirou and Sera," she ordered, "Get all those villagers clothed and ready to return home." She glanced vehemently at Blackburn. "I'll take care of these two."

But Erza didn't have a way to save Morgana, did she? Shirou didn't either, not when his only useful ability involved tracing swords and hurting people. There were only two projections in his Reality Marble that were defensive, and among them…

A King's Dream for an Everdistant Utopia.

 _With this sheath by her side, King Arthur will never bleed._

Avalon. How had he missed it!?

"Wait."

"What is it?" Erza demanded angrily. "Can't you see we have a life in danger?"

" I can, perfectly well." Shirou scratched his head nervously. He knew he had Avalon somewhere, but he hadn't tried to Project it without Saber's help. The magic sheath was built to work for on King Arthur, and it was only when it had stayed for ten years in Shirou that he had become able to use it. He didn't even know if it would work on Morgana, and he didn't want to give anyone false hope.

"… I might have something. I think," Shirou continued uncertainly, "that I can save her."

"You!?" Blackburn guffawed with some effort. "You, a failed mage, save Morgana!?"

"… Yes."

But in the end, no matter the mistakes made in the attempt or the problems that arose in the process, he would not give up on saving everyone.

Even if it was just an impossible dream.


	6. Chapter 6

**Author's note:**

 **Jesus Christ! I didn't expect this update to take so long. Months... this is inexcusable. Gotta buck up on my work.**

 **In any case! Here's Chapter 6. Unfortunately, all my replies to past reviews seem to have been lost in the sands of time. In any case, there's a lot of of plotholes in the past few chapters (believe me, I'm aware) and I'll be filling them up one by one as time passes.**

 **Thank you, Eldest Tempest! Your faithful and dedicated support is the only reason this Chapter has arrived here, today! Enjoy the story ahead!**

Lucy's glazed eyes pored over the pile of old tomes, her eyes flitting leisurely from plot to intriguing plot. Thanks to the crazy old Duke of Everlue, her tiny library had grown that much wider, and after that crazy incident at Oshibana town, she finally had the time to read all of it.

"Honestly, Lucy, how do you even read these things?"

Lucy's eyebrow twitched, her ears painfully registering each step, as Natsu trudged into the library. The pinkette mage flitted lazily from page to page, only to find each plot more soporific than the last. Before long, he lost interest altogether and tossed the offending book over his shoulder. Beside his feet, Happy grumbled something inaudible about books and fish, and promptly followed his example.

"Hey! Don't treat books like this! These are valuable, you know?" Clumsily, Lucy's hands caught the first book, then the other. "Who knows what amazing stories are written in here!"

Her eyes lit up as she caught sight of the second title. "See? This one's about King Arthur. It's as rare as they come!"

"B-o-ring…" came the lazy reply. A violently shove later, Natsu was on his feet and the boring books, on the floor. "Happy, these stories are lousy. Why don't we find us a job!" He strode out, and with an enthusiastic "Aye, Sir!", Happy flitted out with him. Only an open-jawed Lucy remained, glancing in absolute disbelief from her team to her beloved books.

 _King Arthur and the Holy Grail, Boring!?_

Lucy's eyebrows scrunched, and scrunched some more, and by the time Natsu stepped out, they were a giant dead knot. "Serves him right, anyway," she huffed, opening the rare storybook in frustration. "It's not my fault if he doesn't know about Guinevere and Lancelot…"

Suffice to say, Lucy had heard many good things about the book. She looked forward to reading all of it. Without interruption from a certain annoying kid and his equally annoying cat, preferably. And right now...

… Lucy glanced at the doorway. No sign of pink hair, nor any tufts of blue. Almost delightfully, she threw herself back onto the chair. The book cover was flung open, and before long, the blonde found her azure eyes flitting attentively from page to page.

The story didn't disappoint at all. From the moment Uther Pendragon foresaw his death, to the enigmatic wizard Merlin's arcane prophecy and the young squires' crazy exploits under Sir Ector, Lucy found herself utterly invested in the young Arthur's story. Even in the short snippets she'd seen, Arthur looked like an honest, honourable man.

Just like a prince! A King to be! Such stalwart principles, such unshakeable ideals? Oh, how she wished he were alive, ready to ride up to her one day, and scoop her up in his hands!

So, it was with great consternation that Lucy realized how much trouble Arthur was in, when Kay suddenly realized that Arthur had forgotten his sword. She gnawed anxiously at her nails as the young, honest Arthur ran from blacksmith to blacksmith, hoping for a sword that Sir Kay could use, only to find that the blacksmiths were all hired for the tournament. Too honorable to borrow one from another participating knight, and too honest to steal, the young man caught a rumour about a sword buried in an anvil before the church, that nobody had been able to pull out.

Her hands almost shook with suspense as she turned the page, watched Arthur approach the sword and wrap his hands around it. Could he pull it out?

"Hey, Lucy!"

 _And there he goes again!_

"What is it this time?"

With an explosive sigh, Lucy rose from her exciting tale and turned to the grinning pinkette. "You're uncommonly cheerful," she snorted, throwing a lazy glance at her partner. "Did you beat Gray up, or worse yet, destroy Erza's cake?"

"No, something even better!" Natsu replied belatedly. "Listen, Lucy, this trumps pranking Gray and Erza any time of the day!" The fire mage released a bout of fire to prove his point. Black soot trickled down her hair, and Lucy had to restrain her eyebrow from its uncontrollable twitching.

"Happy, show her," Natsu added belatedly, shoving Lucy's increasingly annoyed frown aside. The flying blue cat dived in and revealed in its paws… a blank piece of paper?

"This isn't some kind of joke, is it?" Lucy deadpanned, scanning the paper suspiciously. "You didn't break me off from The Legend of King Arthur to give me a… random… … job… …. …"

No, this wasn't possible. There had to be some kind of mistake, Lucy had seen enough job posters to know that. Sure, people were generally generous with Fairy Tail, but they couldn't be that generous, could they?

They were offering SEVEN MILLION JEWELS for something as run-of-the-mill as breaking a curse! With that money, no, with even a quarter of that prize, she wouldn't even need to worry about rent for the next hundred-odd months! Surely nobody could be that free with their money, right?

Wrong, because right beneath the poster was a stamp that made even Lucy's jaw drop.

"You didn't!"

"Happy did," Natsu lied smoothly. "That idiot Laxus taunted us about S-class jobs and payouts. Whoever let him be S-class, anyway?" he huffed. "We can do a job just as well as he can!"

Lucy's eyebrow twitched even more violently. What was Natsu thinking, trying for an S-class Quest? Aside from the very obvious fact that neither Natsu nor Lucy herself (sadly) were S-class mages, and, hence, allowed to take on such a quest, S-class quests were on a level of difficulty that beggared her tongue to describe. The privileged few who could take them on, S-Class mages, were the elite of the elite, mages so capable with their magic that some could wipe an entire Dark Guild out on their own.

Even for these… Titans… among mages, S-class quests were arduous, life-threatening. In the form of legendary monsters, ancient magic constructs and dark guilds, danger awaited every ambitious S-class Mage at every corner. At the thought of meeting a monster strong enough to confront Erza, even Lucy felt the shudder in her knees.

And now Natsu was suggesting that they, just him, Lucy, and Happy, take on this job? Did that guy have a death wish?

"No, I won't be going." Lucy crossed her arms and turned back to her book. "I'm too young to die."

"Then I guess I'll be selling the Celestial Key," Natsu decided, strutting off before the stupefied Lucy.

Wait, there was a Celestial Key?

"Please do!" Happy urged him. "I bet I can buy a lot of fish with that money!"

"FINE! I'LL COME!"

The duo turned in mock surprise at the red-faced blonde. Lucy could feel her temple throbbing, now. They were planning this all along, weren't they!

"Why didn't you mention the Celestial Keys earlier? I'll come," Lucy insisted, hurriedly throwing together her travel kit of one sleeping bag and a spare set of clothes. As she turned to follow Natsu out, Lucy scooped the book into her hands. It seemed only right to finish such a wonderful story.

She looked at the book and froze. On the open page, Arthur reached for the sword in the stone, but could he really succeed in pulling out the sword where so many others had failed?

No, wait. Something was wrong. She had seen that sword before. That blue pommel, the golden hilt, the sapphire encrusted blade, she had all seen those before. That sword…

… it belonged to Shirou, did it not?

*The Fairy Who Could*

The ritual was ongoing when it happened.

Lyon watched with increasing disbelief and frustration as the falling curtain of purple raindrops ground to a slow stop, widened his eyes at the heads and bodies, turning away from the ritual and toward something behind him. The Moon Drip ritual was almost complete, Deliora almost ready for him to take down in Ur's stead. It was something he- no, something they had looked forward to for three long years! So why-

"Reitei-sama!"

Mellow, affectionate, and utterly inappropriate given their relationship, the honorific dragged Lyon out of his growing shock. Beside him, another mage in shockingly pink hair and twin tails turned, her affectionate professions forgotten. Gradually, with the white cloak billowing majestically behind him, the bewildered ice mage turned toward the spectacle, the ongoing ritual behind him entirely forgotten.

And for a brief moment, he felt a second wave of surprise claim him.

He would forever remember it as a second sunrise, a stunning burst of light that flooded the both the temple and the devastated villagers within with rays of liquid gold- no, like the sun's yolk dragged across the atmosphere, an entire pillar of blinding white stretching from horizon to zenith. Even then, he felt the words were inadequate, dwarfed by the actual scene as he was by the purple Moon above him.

"Reitei-sama," Sherry gushed, "such brilliance! Is it not unlike the magnificence of my love for you?" Those words passed through the masked mage unheeded. The holy luminescence seized his attention for one second, two, and then an entire minute, before he finally realized what it would mean.

Firstly, something-or someone- very powerful had entered Fiore.

The brilliance gave it away. Those rays covered half the horizon, stretching so far they licked upon his temple. Anything that incredible, that powerful, could match, no, it could easily surpass his power. It might even compete with his powerful teacher, Ur, herself!

And secondly, that he, Lyon Vastily, had to get his hands on it. What better target to prove his incredible prowess against?

"Toby!" He yelled, eyes still glued to the gleaming spire of light in the horizon. "Fetch me Zalty at once!" He wasn't the only one to spot it, and he would definitely not be the only person to pursue it. He had to get the artefact, and to do so, he had to get there first. No one was more worthy of it than him. He would ask his best subordinate to fetch it for him-

"Lord Reitei, the old man just left!"

The dog's annoying accent hit him like a bucket of cold water. Why did his best subordinate have to leave right now? Damn, he'd have to get over there himself!

"Woah! What is that bright light in the distance, my lord?"

The dog-headed mage barely shut his mouth before a giant ball of ice encased him. The servant was as annoying as he was stupid, and for once, Lyon had had enough of his henchman's idiocy.

*The Fairy Who Could*

Across the bridge from the Shinto district, hidden beneath the silhouettes of neighbouring townhouses, the Emiya Residence awaited. In the past two years, the sprawling Japanese Mansion had become home to many guests, among them heroes, kings and magi of every stripe and crest, its leaf-strewn entrance host to True Magicians.

Now, no light passed through the front. No shoes accompanied the front door. The mansion before Rin's eyes looked dilapidated, abandoned, almost as if is once lively halls had been emptied of its illustrious guests.

No, not emptied, she corrected herself. Abandoned, but not emptied.

Rin shook her head, her flowing twin tails falling neatly across her shoulders. When she'd entered the clock tower, Rin had left her hairstyle and her less mature habits at the gate. It wouldn't do to appear incompetent to her fellow mages, not before the watchful eyes of the haughty scions that dominated that vulture's nest, not when she was the next student of the Kaleidoscope. Certainly not before that Finnish cow Luviagelita.

But now, here she was, donning that childhood hairdo for a childhood friend.

Shirou Emiya. Servant. Hero. Idiot. High School Crush. Also KIA.

Zelretch, Master of the Second Magic, mighty vampire, an old man so venerable and strict... even Rin couldn't spot the nefarious pranks behind his stern eyes. But for once, he had no jokes for her, only a simple letter in an equally simple envelope.

Rin had torn up the letter on the spot.

She had cried over him, cried so hard, Zelretch confined her to antoher dimension. And then she had realized that, grief aside, that idiot had left her a duty and that time was running out.

It had taken a liberal amount of hypnotism, and even more of her vaunted jewellery collection, to get herself from London to Tokyo with the fastest means available to man. All on the hope that she would arrive before the letter could. And now, here she was, standing before Shirou Emiya's former home with every indication that she had been too late.

"Tohsaka."

A few minutes earlier, that voice would have surprised Rin. Shocked her, even, that the lavender-haired Matou was actually functioning normally, was not breaking down in the Matou Residence with a heart more shattered than her own. Her former sister, Sakura, had had the biggest crush ever on the orange-haired idiot. Rin wasn't sure that she'd even survive the news. Especially not with the way the entire Matou household treated her like a third wheel, a torture subject, a means to an end. The fact that Sakura was standing here, calmly brushing aside the tears in her eyes, was a consolation for five seconds.

Five seconds, Rin thought to herself. Five seconds of utter idiocy. Sakura Matou didn't get through this by herself. She would not be smiling so calmly at the door had she not met someone else, first.

Sakura nodded urgently, once. She was right, Rin knew. Sooner or later, Rin would have to break the news. In fact, sooner would be better, because even a master as well-equipped as Rin couldn't keep Saber from disappearing. Her hands reached the door-

-and removed itself almost immediately, as the front door to Shirou's house flew wide open. Rin suppressed an unwomanly yelp and confronted the situation with all the Tohsaka calmness she could muster.

"Good day, Altria Emiya."

The accomplished magus could see a amber tint behind those turquoise eyes, ugly black burns across her usually neat short skirt, ruffles and folds upon her immaculate white blouse. The little figure raised her head, turning her unsettled eyes onto the Tohsaka sisters with a madness that made even Rin flinch.

"Rin! You're Rin, aren't you?" A hint of recognition flashed across those glassy eyes, and the decrepit figure jumped forward, grasping her hands with bone-crunching strength. For a moment, Rin had to remind herself that she wasn't dealing with a normal human, but a heroic spirit. "Sakura doesn't understand, but you- you know magecraft! You have to!"

Gods.

Rin exchanged a worried glance with Sakura. Sure, she knew that Altria would be out of sorts, but she didn't know that it would be this bad. If there was one person hit harder than Sakura Matou, it was his Servant, Saber. Right now, with her arms trembling uncontrollably and her gaze flickering with lunacy, Rin could hardly believe that this woman was the King of Knights.

"Saber-san, it's okay. We're here-" Sakura touched the Servant, but Altria only flinched away from her touch and tightened her grip on Rin.

"It's okay, Sakura. Let's hear what she has to say."

With a gentle pat on her sister's shoulder, the mage let the heroic spirit drag her into the house.

The interior of the house was neat and tidy, a far cry from the dust and cobwebs that Rin had expected. Even in her crazed state, Saber had clearly taken great pains to keep the house clean. Sakura, by far the most familiar, flipped on the lights and entered the kitchen with Saber right behind, while Rin took a seat at the table.

"Have some tea, Rin." The blonde appeared at the doorway, tea set shaking in her hands. Rin raised an eyebrow, but she made no comment as Saber set it down. "I'm sorry that Shirou isn't here at the moment- really, Merlin knows what he's up to, after fighting a monster like that- but I'll make sure he's here next time."

"Shirou is dead, you know."

Saber's flinch would have been funny under other circumstances. Rin, though, loved the orange-haired idiot too much to bring herself to laugh at Saber.

"So, this is how King Arthur acts in grief?"

"Nee-san, that's too much!"

"Rin, you misunderstand!"

"Really."

Rin glanced coldly across the table. Saber's hands still trembled a little on her lap, but she had clearly calmed down and was now looking away from Rin's gaze, embarrassment clear in her eyes.

"Saber, I know you don't want to hear this, but Shirou is gone." She looked coldly at Saber's maddened eyes. "We all tried to stop him, you know. Told him that he was going up against an inhuman monster, that even he was going to die. That idiot did it anyway and now he's gone." She huffed once at Saber's listless silence.

One night of counseling wouldn't cure any form of madness, but she had to try her best, even if she was going to be brutal. Either Saber took her chance at recovering and lived on, or she died, withering away slowly and painfully in her madness, and Rin wasn't about to let her just disappear.

 _Not after what she promised him._

"He was a good person, you know. A hero with a really dense head, but a hero nonetheless. I can't count the number of people he's already saved by putting his life on the line. But he's dead, Saber." With a calm sip of tea, Rin continued, "he's gone. He's not coming back. Shirou Emiya is deceased, Saber, and you should move on."

The silence in the room was almost tangible. Even Sakura's vegetable chopping in the background had stopped, and the lavenderette was staring at her diced greens with an incomprehensible frown. Rin watched candidly as Saber's face scrunched up, as her fingers tightened around her teacup, as her shaking body trembled even more violently.

 _Looks like it's still too early. I'll check back in an hour._

Rin made to stand up.

"No, he's not gone."

Saber's shoulders shook violently, spilling more than a few drops from her cup. Her face was red, but red with an emotion that stretched deeper than fury and broader than fear. Her voice was calm, composed, or as calm and composed as a madwoman's voice could get. She was mad, Rin's senses screamed at her, madder than a March Hare, madder even than all of the Mad Hatter's Hat Mats.

"You didn't feel it, Rin," Saber mumbled under her breath. "You didn't have a bond with him, so you wouldn't understand." Her hands danced to the invisible blade by her side, stroking it ever so slightly. "He used it, you know. He used my Noble Phantasm. He used my Noble Phantasm. He can't use my Noble Phantasm if he's dead. He's alive."

 _She's really gone off the deep end. An hour isn't enough. Maybe a day or two._

"I don't know where you picked up that twisted sense of humour, Saber," Rin interrupted savagely, "but that's your Noble Phantasm you're touching. Caliburn is broken, Shirou can't use Excalibur, and Invisible Air is clearly right under your fingertips! It's not like you have any other Noble Phantasms in your legend..."

Wait.

No. in found herself floundering, her flustered eyes looking for answers on Sakura's clueless face, in Saber's unsettled eyes. It couldn't be. It had been lost a long time ago, lost and never found, gone so deep into the ages that hundreds of thousands of Altrian scholars and Mages never managed to dig it up until the Fourth Holy Grail War, and it had vanished into the Einzberns' possession. Rin had barely remembered it then, among the many stories that Kirei belted out about the War to allay her suspicions. But in that case, it would be with the Einzbern's master, Emiya Kiritsugu...

… foster father of Emiya Shirou. The person who gave him those accursed ideals. Those stupid ideals had sent him to his grave, forgotten by all save her and a few others.

Also the man responsible for saving Shirou from the Great Fuyuki Fire, ten years ago. The fire had hurt him so much, he had thrown aside his emotions, his thoughts, his very identity, just to keep himself alive -and nearly died any way.

He should have died, Rin realized. Shirou Emiya's father was in no condition to save him, as terrible in magic as the guy was, but Shirou Emiya had survived anyway. Survived, and made a full recovery.

 _So long as she has the sheath, King Arthur will not bleed in battle._

Gae Bolg. Berserker's axe-sword. Shirou had indeed survived many injuries, injuries that should have killed him in minutes. He shouldn't have recovered from any of them, but recover he did, his injuries healing a year's worth in a day.

"But you can't be sure," Rin continued defiantly, her voice shaking almost as bad as Saber's now. "How do you know? How can you be so sure that Shirou Emiya has Avalon, and not something else? How can you be sure that he still has it, even now?"

"I saw Avalon in him," Saber murmured, half to herself. "I healed him once, when Kirei got Lancer to run him through. It was a gamble," she admitted. "I didn't know for sure that my sheath was in him, but he recovered when I fed him my prana. Not even Gae Bolg's curse could stop his wound from closing. If there is one artefact that can do that, it can only be Avalon."

"And how did you know he still has it... That idiot! He activated it, didn't he!?" Rin didn't know just how far Command Seals could stretch, but it was an easy guess that their ability to sense the activation of noble phantasms could work in both directions. Still, what the heck was Shirou thinking, using Avalon on his own? Didn't he know how powerful it was, or how much prana he needed to kickstart it? Did he have a death wish?

"Sakura," Rin ordered, "pack your things. As for you, Saber…" her eyes narrowed. "Come with me," she decided eventually. "Bring Excalibur with you, too. Zelretch will need some convincing."

Not that Excalibur would do anything to that damned Apostle Ancestor, of course, but Rin wasn't going to let him get away with this!

*The Fairy Who Could*

"I woke up late again, didn't I?"

Shirou's eyes flickered open, catching the first rays of the sun as they spilled through faraway ridges into his eyes. From the hard ground beneath his aching back, and the strained numbness spread all over his body, he'd clearly fallen asleep in the shed again. It was definitely way past six, and a familiar armoured silhouette sat silently next to his prone body. Damn, Saber was up already. He'd better get to making breakfast before she let her inner lion loose on him... wait, when did Saber dye her hair?

"Shirou Emiya, you're awake."

Right. He wasn't in Fuyuki City anymore.

"Good morning, Erza Scarlet."

The Japanese mansion he had become so used to was a world away from this crumbling bandit camp. Erza seemed to like wearing plate armour, but aside from that, Erza and Altria Pendragon were two separate persons.

And he still mixed them up. Shirou really needed his head examined.

"I've already brought the villagers back."

"That's good to hear."

The two shared more similarity than their choices of battle fashion. Briefly, Shirou wondered, if Erza liked to eat just as much as Shirou did.

"Is something the matter, Shirou?" Erza wondered, cold eyes locked on him.

"Nothing much," Shirou replied hastily, "I was just wondering what you wanted for breakfast."

"I can do without it. Besides," the armor-clad redhead sniffed, "I do not expect to find anything worth eating in this abandoned fort." For a brief moment, a pout flashed before her face, disappearing just as quickly as it came. "I didn't know that you could cook, Shirou. Do you just do regular meal entrees, or is baking within your expertise?"

If Shirou noticed her expression, he gave no sign. "I do bake sometimes, I guess. I used to help out at a café back in Fuyuki city, and they taught me how to make dessert cakes," he furnished, walking into the bandits' storage room. The thought brought Neko-san and Happy to mind, and Shirou had to suppress a laugh. It wasn't the first time he'd run into a talking cat, after all.

"Hmm," the redhead continued disinterestedly with an inscrutable expression. "Your repertoire wouldn't happen to include strawberry cakes, would it?"

"Actually, strawberry cakes were one of the more popular sweets," Shirou recalled. Those sweets were a hot favourite with Cafe Ahnenerbe's girl-based clientele. He could remember that one time when Rin stuffed her face with one slice of cake after another and tried to convince Shirou (unsuccessfully) that her baking was better... wait a minute.

"Do you like cakes, Erza?"

"Not that much more than anything else. Well then," Erza replied after a brief silence, "In that case, I suppose I wouldn't mind if we had a good meal in the morning." The redhead's lips curled upward. Shirou pretended not to notice, preferring to dig further into the bandits' food crates. Breakfast was the most important meal in the morning, doubly so when he had to serve Saber as well. Hell had no fury like a hungry knight.

Which reminded him, once again: Saber was still at home.

Breakfast was simple, a makeshift meal crumble and some crushed strawberries he'd found in an underground store. Shirou bit into his portion, balking almost immediately at the lacking taste. He threw a worried glance at Erza, who was poking suspiciously around her own pie with a spoon she'd fished out from somewhere.

"What is this, Shirou?" She asked absentmindedly.

Having finally convinced herself that her breakfast was, indeed, some variation of a strawberry confection, the redhead finally rate a spoon of the crumble. For a brief moment, she said nothing, munching quietly on her little portion of what passed for sighed despite himself. It was too much to hope his cooking skills could mask the lack of sugar, after all.

"Shirou."

Shirou winced. "Yes, Erza?"

"Hmm. Yes. I suppose you'll do," Erza decided, looking Shirou in the eye. "I don't usually take along team members for my quests, but I'll make an exception for you." With great fanfare, the S-class mage set her food down, got to her feet, and offered him a handshake. "I look forward to having more of your hand-made meals."

"WHAT!?"

With an equally inelegant yelp, Shirou dropped his breakfast and Erza snatched it from the floor. Before Shirou's disbelieving eyes, the red-haired woman cleaned up the remains of his breakfast.

"Mmm! Your cooking is not just excellent, it's consistent, too! Strawberry cakes, every breakfast, lunch, and supper... I can't wait!"

"I'm glad you like my cooking so much," Shirou managed, "I'm not sure I'm ready to think of us as a permanent team."

Just as he finished his sentence, Erza's claymore found its place in the ground: so close, he could see his shocked eyes in its gleaming blade.

"Surrender to my graces, Shirou," Erza deadpanned. "I'll be the best teammate you ever have."

"Don't you dare, Scary Woman!" Before Shirou could utter another word, a second pair of hands wrapped themselves around his waist. Up climbed a second person, a child barely ten years old, her golden hair spilling liberally over Shirou's left shoulder. With a furious huff, the girl stared Erza down and huffed. "Shirou saved me, so he is my hero! You get that, Scary Woman? He's mine!"

"My, my. What a lively breakfast this is."

Shirou turned at the ragged voice. Beneath his ragged fringe, the black-clad mage known as Ethan Blackmore glanced amusedly between Sera, Shirou and Erza. "Well, I've heard stories back home, but I never imagined that the crush of the Tohsaka Heiress was such a womanizer." Sera flinched immediately, disappearing behind Shirou's back, and Erza glared at him with hostile eyes.

Shirou himself looked up warily, searching the old man's face for any trickery. Magi were a treacherous lot. Without Rin as a go-between, Shirou would never dare to take the Clock Tower's jobs, and she wasn't here to help him at the moment.

"I don't suppose you have a problem with the terms of my self-Geas," Shirou said, his voice dangerously low. Ethan merely ignored him, his eyes hooked to the pot of unfinished crumble instead.

"Ah, I see you've made breakfast." The Ethan helped himself to a portion and sat down, casually, right next to Shirou. Sera bristled immediately and stuffed herself between them, but the old man hardly noticed and continued to chomp away at Shirou's strawberry pie. "I've already accepted the terms," the old mage managed between munches. "Necromancy was never my main style of magic, anyway. I picked it up to save my foster daughter. Speaking of which, you never told me how you came by something as powerful as Avalon."

"You never told me how you came to Fiore," was Shirou's reply. "Or how you even knew my name, or, for that matter, how you came by Morgana."

Ethan suppressed a laugh. "Shirou, are you really that dense? Everyone in the Clock Tower has heard of you at one point or another." The old mage grabbed a drink from his canteen. "You don't subdue three rogue mages under Sealing Designations without becoming famous in that college, no. Those people were downright dangerous even among Mages, and you took all of them down single-handedly."

"Shirou," Erza asked warily, "what's a Sealing Designation?"

Now, it was Shirou's turn to bristle. "Sera," he urged, his eyes not leaving Ethan's. "Why don't you take a look at Aunty Morgana, see how she's doing." The young blonde raised her head curiously. "Don't worry, these scary people won't attack you. My Geas should take care of that."

Sera nodded, slightly confused, and walked back into the caves.

"Right." Shirou turned back to the man, but he'd already gone on with his introductions.

"Erza... Erza Scarlet of Fairy Tail, is it? The all-famous Queen of Fairies, still so naïve." The old geezer suppressed a laugh. "Don't let the beautiful veneer of Fiore fool you, Erza. Mages can be very insistent when it comes to research. If moral values stand between a mage and a possible breakthrough, you can be sure that those morals will be thrown into the wind." Ignoring Erza's glare, the old man continued, "I used to be like them, you know. Unscrupulous, until I met one Designee myself."

"Oh, it was nothing, really," Ethan said with a dismissive wave, as Shirou raised an eyebrow. "You see, Sealing Designations are just a fancy way of saying that the Clock Tower has claimed you as its test subject. All you need to do is to break the formal rules of Magecraft and do something that physical phenomena are incapable of, and voila, you're sealed."

"The Sealing Designation doesn't sound so bad when you put it like that," Erza prompted with a serious face.

"It's not as simple as he says it is, Erza," Shirou replied through clenched teeth. "Being slapped with a Sealing Designation is like a death sentence. If you're caught, you're no longer treated as a human being. You'll be cut up into pieces of meat, to be preserved and studied until the mages at the Clock Tower figure out just how you managed something that generations of magi couldn't figure out."

"… that is cruel and unacceptable. Thankfully, guilds in Fiore won't do that," Erza managed, setting her crumble down. Shirou's cooking was great, but the conversation had robbed her all of her appetite. "But Shirou, you said you captured three of those people?"

Shirou nodded in agreement. "… I had no choice, then. My targets were desperate. They were killing, killing for the sake of their stupid experiments, killing to stop the Enforcers chasing them, killing to reach their goal before their death sentence arrived. I had to stop them. I tried to get them placed under kinder mages, but in the end, I could not save them."

"Anyway, as I was saying, I visited a guy with a Sealing Designation. He used to be one of my friends, then, and the moment he'd been brought in I went to visit him." Ethan's face darkened. "I found him chained up, buckled with reinforced steel more tightly than a straitjacket restrains a madman. There were so many runes, so much prana poured into his restraints that I couldn't see his own prana signature at all, and through it all he was pleading, begging for his life to be spared. I couldn't even get a single word through to him before he was sent to the slaughterhouse."

A coldness descended on the picnic, one that even the building light of dawn could not lift, and Erza was once more reminded that these two mages came from a world more cruel than her own.

"Was... Morgana... one of them?" She asked quietly.

"Morgana? By the Root, no!" Blackburn cursed, but her concern clearly lifted his mood. "She's from Fiore. Back to the story. So there I was, down in the dumps after seeing my friend sent to his death, and up walks this old man in a black suit and a cane." Ethan smiled lopsidedly at Shirou's alarm. "Yup, you guessed right: the Kaleidoscope, Kischur Zelretch Schweinorg, right in front of my very eyes."

Kischur Zelretch Schweinorg. Apostle Ancestor. Master of the Second Magic, the Kaleidoscope. Effectively the master of the multiverse, with the ability to teleport to, or summon objects from, other dimensions. Also the oldest troublemaker in the Clock Tower. For a moment, Shirou wondered if his ending up in Fiore was indeed Zelretch's fault too.

Perhaps Shirou was in Fiore because Rin, being the intelligent vixen she was, had somehow got Zelretch to prank him. Unlikely at best, though. Zelretch would've sent her back to the Fifth Holy Grail War as his Servant, and grabbed popcorn on the way.

"So that's how you ended up in Fiore," Shirou mumbled.

"Of course, I knew him. Actually, rather, I knew of him. Everyone knows a person who riles up the entire Clock Tower just by walking into it. I just didn't know that that guy was standing there and I didn't recognize him. Being the hot-blooded teenager then, I brushed right past that guy, making sure that my push was felt." Ethan laughed. "I didn't even manage to touch his shoulder before he noticed. The old troll mumbled something about me needing to 'learn my manners' and the very next thing I knew, here I was."

"You WHAT?" Shirou gaped. "And you were a teenager then? How long ago was this?"

"Eighty years."

The ancient mage carried on with his stoic, aged freckles. Either he didn't notice their shock, or he was enjoying it privately under his bushy moustache.

Since then I've roamed this world as a bandit, a rogue mage, a necromancer. A person who saved an orphaned girl from eternal persecution and experimentation. A foster father." Ethan poked thoughtfully at his unfinished crumble. "So many years have passed, and I have completed my pursuit... only to find nothing at the road's end."

"Not nothing," Shirou argued. "You saved your daughter, didn't you?"

"Hah! A humble one, aren't you?" Ethan chuckled. "No, you did the job with... say, it has been a long time since I saw something like that. Avalon, was it?"

Erza stirred, and the memories came rushing back.

Avalon. Sacred sheath. The dream of an Everdistant Utopia. The place where all heroes go in their afterlives. An artifact that, like Saber, stood by him at every moment, saving him from the likes of Berserker, Rider, and Kotomine Kirei's tained Holy Grail. The symbol of his relationship with Saber, now Altria Emiya, glowing with the light of the very ideals he pursued.

And he'd been away from Saber for so long that he had forgotten. His body had forgotten what it was like to be in Saber's presence, and when it had finally basked in Avalon's radiance once again, it had forgotten too that it was no longer in Fuyuki anymore.

"Yes, it's been a long time," Shirou mused.

"And where in the whole of Fuyuki city would one find an artifact as rare as that..." Ethan mused. "One does not simply pick Avalon up from the streets, Zelretch would say. Damn him and his pop culture memes.

"I met King Arthur."

" _WHAT?_ "

"Wait, Shirou. I'm not ready for this." Ethan sat up in an instant, incredulity filling his once-disinterested eyes. "I must be getting old. I'm pretty sure I didn't just hear you say that you _met_ King Arthur. For that matter," he added, "I'm pretty sure that you didn't just _meet_ a person from nearly a millennium ago."

"I did," A smile came over Shirou's face. "Most certainly. She was the warmest person I ever met." For a brief moment, he felt the warmth of Avalon wash over him, the warmth of Saber's ideals and her love.

 _I'll never see her again, not in this world. Not until I pursue my ideal to its end._

"… you were part of the Holy Grail War," Ethan grumbled. "There's no other explanation. Well, at least I can see where you got your stupid ideas from." He took another swig of his canteen, and a few moments passed in relative silence before he finally noticed what Shirou had said and did a perfect spit-take.

" Wait, WHAT!?"

Well, not perfect. Nobody could do those quite like Rin. Shirou noticed the growing half-smile dancing at his lips and cursed himself. Archer was a bad influence on him. A really bad influence, even when dead.

Probably also having a good laugh at his expense.

"King Arthur is a WOMAN!?"

"Yes, she is," Shirou facepalmed. "She's also my girlfriend."

"She is Saber, is she not," Erza asked with a comically straight face.

"Yes, she is."

"HAH! HAHA! HAHAHAHAHA! You are shaping out to be quite the interesting person, Shirou!" Ethan's guffaws echoed through the valley. "You actually got King Arthur to be your girlfriend? In the middle of a Grail War? That's-that's priceless!" The old man continued to chuckle, unaware of Erza and Shirou's dirty glares at him."And I thought your heroic quest was funny!"

"What's so funny about that?" Shirou demanded.

"Shirou." To his credit, the old man managed to keep his laughter down. "You can't seriously believe that you can save everyone, can you?"

And to that, Shirou had already given his answer. His stern, silent expression said as much, silencing Ethan in mid-laughter.

"Ah... haha... look, Shirou, you're chasing an impossible dream," Ethan retorted. "There's nothing more hypocritical in this world than trying to save everyone. Let me finish, Shirou, Erza," he instructed. "Humans are like that. They want, they seek. For their wants, they will do anything, even kill. They're not going to stop even if you want them to."

"When they do that, what are you going to do? Save one side from the other? Save both sides? But the moment you let go of them, they will rush to each other's throats before you know it." Ethan shook his head, pointedly ignoring Shirou's wordless glare. "Where there are humans, there will be war, and wars can only ever be stopped if you kill one side or the other. Sometimes not even then. Now, young man ," Ethan asked, "who will you save? Who will you kill? Or will you try to save everyone, knowing all too well that they would tear away each others' throats once you're gone?"

Shirou didn't answer. For all the resolve he had for his ideal, Ethan's words had still hit home.

 _An apt hypocrisy for a Faker like you._ Sure, he may not have heard those words before, but Shirou knew that it was something Gilgamesh would have said of him. It didn't matter just how much resolve he had. He was bearing an infinitely heavy burden with little thought on how he could possibly support it. He had chosen to continue carrying it, even after seeing what it had done to his other self, Archer, but there was nothing stopping that weight from crushing him like it did Archer.

"Ethan, you're wrong."

To his surprise, it was Erza who spoke up for him.

"Humans are not as weak as you think they are," The redhead asserted." They all have their own reasons to continue doing evil, even if they know that what they've done, what they're doing is wrong. But that doesn't mean that they can't change, because while their actions are evil, the people themselves have their own conscience. As mages, as problem solvers, we must show them another way." she argued, planting her sword firmly down. "Of course, this job isn't easy. Salvation never is. That's why we're both in Fairy Tail. Even if one of us cannot shoulder the burden, we can do it together!"

"And that's 19-year-old logic for you," Ethan retorted with a sardonic laugh. "In combat, you may be the S-class Titania, the Queen of Faeries, but out of battle you're still an overgrown kid. Before you get too excited, Erza, remember that I have seen mages send themselves to their deaths for sixty more years than you have. As for you," Ethan turned to Shirou with a dark look. "I'm glad you saved Morgana. I can see, even, why Avalon worked for you, even though it was only supposed to protect King Arthur. So I'll say this only once."

"You're best off forgetting your love for King Arthur. Your ideals will send you to an early grave."

 _Let your ideals drag you to your death!_

A freezing chill rolled through his body.

Archer's words. Those were definitely Archer's words. And yet, Shirou had never heard those words before. Archer had never said that to him. So why could he recall it? And just what was he so afraid of?

"Tell me," Shirou asked, voice trembling. "What do you-"

He never got to finish his question. At that very moment, a piercing scream shot forth from the mines.

"Morgana!"

"Sera!"

*The Fairy Who Could*

"Don't- you think- you've got me!"  
Through the eerie, mostly unlit cavern, the deadly white comet that was Morgana shot up. Just as she did, the space she left was immediately violated by two pearly orbs, whizzing up with an angle and speed that should have been impossible for any flying object.

It's not a fight between mages until impossibilities arise.

First, there was her magic. Her strange magic. She didn't know exactly what happened, only something happened. Only the cold, black mark upon her heart, there for as long as she could remember, now gone. It was only too easy to test. She tried to draw its power, tried to call its shadows to her bidding...

But where she asked for shadow, only light came.

Not to say that it wasn't useful, of course, Morgana noted, breaking the second orb with a beam of light. Much easier to get. Still, she was only feeling out the ropes. Battle wasn't the nicest place to learn her magic all over again.

Thumb pressed against fingertips, cold sweat dripping from her brow, Morgana glared at her opponent.

"My turn."

At a snap of her fingers, light rays shot forth from all corners of the room and shattered the gleaming orbs with sheer, brute force.

"Not bad."

Morgana's pitch-black opals twitched at the stunted figure before her. The geezer was stunted, his bent back so weathered that he made even Ethan look like a teenager. In the eerie turquoise that filled the cavern,his trailing bushfire hair, tribal colours and demonic mask only made him look all the more dangerous.

"It's a pity, really," the old man noted remorselessly. "You would have been such a great help, had you been in my hands. Well, now that I've gotten what I've come for, I suppose it's time for you to die." With an equal snap of his fingers, another eight crystal balls appeared behind him and whizzed toward Morgana.

Just as quickly, a web of light rays shot forth, shattering each crystal into a thousand tiny pieces. In the midst of raining crystal dust, Morgana permitted her opponent one arrogant sulk.

"Repeating an attack, are we?"

The old man ignored her haughty glance and kept his gaze on the glittering dust.

"Restore."

"For a moment there, I thought we were getting seriou-ARGH!"

What just happened?

As she hurtled out of the air, Morgana's eyes snapped to her destroyed shoulder. There, nocked deep into her bruised body, was a gleaming crystal ball. But by all accounts, even to her senses, Morgana knew that the crystal ball there should have been destroyed _two seconds ago._

"… How..."

As she crashed to the ground, Ethan's teachings clicked in. Anxiously, painfully, Morgana's eyes flickered across the crystal's surface, looking desperately for any clues to her opponent's magicks. When put back together, any crystal would bear the fractures and cracks of its untimely demise, so all she had to do was to study them for any signs of the opponent's magic-

-no, wait. It was impossible. One couldn't just break an egg like that and put it back together, pretending that nothing happened. And yet, the projectile lodged in her shoulder looked unmarred, flawless, as if Morgana's light ray had never struck it down.

The crystal ball had not been put back together. It had never been shattered in the first place.

As if someone had reversed time back beyond the point where it had been broken.

"No, it can't be..." Morgana mumbled. In her reverie, she almost didn't notice the other eight crystals flying toward her. The orbs smashed down on her prone, destroyed body, only to for their target to vanish into motes of light. The black-haired woman appeared beside the old man, light blazing from both hands.

"How... How did you!?" She demanded.

"Surprised, are we?" The old man chuckled. "It's a trade secret of yours truly. You won't need to know, and if you do, you'd still be too dead to use the knowledge. Now," he continued, "if you're done with the nitty gritty details, can we get back to the part where I beat you down and kill you?"

"You think you can beat me so easily?" Morgana yelled. Her blazing fist shot toward the old man, only to be painfully deflected by a second orb. As she leapt back, a third and fourth crystal crashed into the ground beneath her feet, missing her shins by inches. They lifted themselves easily out of the ground and followed the black-haired mage, but four more light rays burst forth, striking each orb down at her command.

"It's futile, you know," the old man taunted behind his barrage of crystal balls. "You can't even beat Erza Scarlet." The old man barely closed his mouth before three light rays shot down to smite him, only to be blocked by another three orbs hovering over his head, and she found herself dodging the punching machines that were orbs six, seven and eight.

One light ray after another shot forth, shattering each crystal orb as it entered her vision. Just as quickly, the orbs reformed, barreling at Morgana once again. One whizzed past her jaw as she shattered it with her good arm; even as she moved, another nailed her across the cheek, drawing a cry from her lips.

"You're really smug about your abilities, aren't you," Morgana mocked, clutching her bruised face. Beam after lightbeam shot forth, skewering all the crystal balls in sight. The beams widened, turning crystal flakes into crumbs, crumbs into dust, dust into vapour. "Let's see how you do without your annoying pets!"

"You never learn your lessons, do you, Morgana?"

With light blazing from both hands, light raining forth from the paradoxically dark ceiling, and light filling the cavern with sheer brilliance alone, Morgana leapt toward her enemy. To her surprise, the old man didn't move, but stared her down with a knowing smirk.

"Checkmate."

She never saw it coming.

One second, she was hurtling toward her attacker, all her light beams burning furiously in midair. The very next, the cavern had gone pitch black. Not even the turquoise background hue of Blackburn's ruins remained in the darkness, only the lingering laugh of an annoying old man.

Or perhaps it was just her face, planted deep in the dirt as one, two, twenty crystal balls nailed her.

One on her skull. Three across her back. Five spread across her elbows, neck and knees, and then all over her body as they buried her under their sheer numbers. A shriek escaped her lips, only to be shut out by the balls that buried her under them.

"Morgana!"

"Sera!"

"Tch. It seems I'm out of time."

The old man's voice seemed to come from a great distance. Far away beyond her sight. Far from the reach of her struggling arm.

"I'll come back for you some other time. For now... I'll deal with your comrades..."

Master Ethan was in danger.

The thought surfaced in her cloudy, fading mind. The old man was coming after Master Ethan. Master Ethan was in danger. She had to help him. She couldn't let Master Ethan come to harm. She had to get up, now, to protect him, even if Morgana could not defeat the old man. So why was her body not listening? Why was it lying on the ground, refusing to get up?

What was this strange darkness coming over her?

*The Fairy Who Could*

The Time was noon, the place, Port Hargeon. A bustling town and a major port in Fiore, deeply engaged in entrepot trade, fishing, and transport via waterways. Erza's eyes scanned the town over, searching for any sign of her quarry.

"I lost him. Damn!"

It was futile. Hargeon was a big town, bigger than her eyes could cover in an instant.

Zalty was crafty. Any half-decent fugitive would've hired a boat and left the town by now. Still, with the wonky outfit he wore, that old man would stand out like a sore thumb even among the strangely dressed mages that traversed its streets. That she had seen no sign of him whatsoever only showed that the old man had found somewhere to hide, or left the town entirely.

And if Zalty had headed for Hargeon, rather than any other town on the map, then there was something important for him here. Hargeon had little to provide for a practitioner of a Lost Magic, which left only one other option: travel by sea.

So she decided to blockade the port.

The pirates didn't take much convincing. When they finally figured out that all the weaponry and magic on their ship had nothing on the Queen of Fairies, they had surrendered immediately and, very kindly, agreed to help Erza man the cannons and sail the ship. So far, they had been very helpful, even pulling a loudspeaker out of nowhere for her to make her statement.

The captain, an old and haggard little man with the stereotypical pirate hat and iron hook, stood beside Erza with an eye in his seeing-glass. He was short, but that didn't stop his telescope from stretching over the railing and surveying the port for any moving boats. Every so often, he would steal a glance at her red hair and look away with a slight pink coloration on his face.

The port didn't take to her plans as well, though, hiding their ships in the docks and pleading for the safety of their port. All the better. Erza didn't want him to leave so soon.

"So, who's this person you're looking for, lass?"

Erza didn't care much. The man was good at his job.

The blockade was going well. Sure, she could've just asked the ferrymen at the port, but it was easier to catch the passenger in the act. Now every boat that tried to move out had to meekly go to the side of her pirate ship and endure her questioning before they could head off. Some of the pirates looked a little miffed at not receiving a passage fee, but they were too smitten by her strength to care much anyway.

"An old man with a mask and green hair," she replied thoughtfully, waving off yet another fishing boat.

The pirate hummed thoughtfully. "Now, I'd say that that would be impossible, but this here ship that's coming over has just such a boat." He frowned. "He's ignoring the cannons, though. Like he doesn't believe that we can sink him."

Sure enough, there was a boat headed toward them. It was large for a boat, a pinnace with two cannons, but one broadside and it would be sitting at the bottom of the port. Erza thought at first that perhaps the ship was out of sight, or that it didn't notice her cannons, but that thought was quickly dismissed when it stubbornly stayed in her field of fire, closing by the second.

Almost as if it was daring the pirates to fire on them.

"Your call, Captain. Should we sink them?"

"No."

Erza watched silently as the boat drifted closer and closer, until she could see that familiar unkempt green hair and the horned red mask. The old man looked up, too, his eyes resting on her red hair, and for the briefest of moments Erza thought she could spot a sly smirk.

"Uh, captain? They're escaping."

"Don't fire."

"Huh?"

Now it was Erza's turn to smile.

Zalty was strong, definitely, but she was the Fairy Queen, Titania. If Zalty thought Erza Scarlet could be manipulated, He was in for a fright. This was the best time to drum it into him.

One did not lure Titania into their plans. Those who did, invariably, tasted her fist. Gauntlet first.

"Set sail," Erza ordered. "We're following them."

*The Fairy Who Could*

"Galuna Island? You've got to be kidding me!"

"Galuna Island? No one even dares to go near that cursed place, not even without this stupid blockade!"

"We don't even mention the name on these docks! It's a bad omen."

"This is really, bad." Lucy shook her head disappointedly. "I still don't know the full extent of how haunted Galuna island is, but not a single person here wants to bring us there."

"We could always swim."

"You don't even know how far out the island is and you want to swim there?" Lucy shook her head. "I've already told you that it's impossible."

To be sure, she could perhaps ask a favour from Aquarius in a pinch, but Lucy somehow doubted that the mermaid Celestial Spirit would bring them closer to the island in any way. That mermaid's idea of "help" involved blasting her away with a tidal wave.

"Well, in that case," Natsu pouted, "there's only that one guy left. We still haven't asked him."

Lucy examined the sailor, a young, well-built man in a bandanna and white cloak. He sat on a boat little more than a raft, clearly meant for fishing and short ferry journeys. It was unlikely that he'd run any ferry trips to an island in open sea, but it was pretty much his boat or a tsunami, and Lucy didn't like her chances onboard a tidal wave.

"Galuna island? Look, I don't know why you want to go there," he replied with a strange look, "but no ship will take you there. Even the pirates are avoiding it."

"It's settled, then," Natsu crowed. "We're swimming!" Happy joined him with an equally happy face.

"Aye!"

"I said," Lucy reminded them savagely, "It's impossible!"

Natsu turned to reply, but whatever he was about to say was suddenly drowned out by the eerie voice behind them.

"I've found you~"

Natsu and Lucy nearly jumped out of their skin.

He wasn't supposed to be there, but there he was, dressed casually in a sling bag and an indigo shirt. The coolness with which that man approached them could only belong to one wizard: Gray Fullbuster!

"Gray!?"

"What the hell are you doing here?" Natsu demanded, more shocked than angry.

Gray flashed the pinkette a condescending look. "I'm here on the Guild Master's orders," he deadpanned, clearly expecting Natsu to have known already. "I'm to bring you back to the guild as soon as possible."

To Lucy's surprise, Natsu jumped away in astonishment. "That old man found out already!?" Part of her wondered how he could be so airheaded: if he'd planned to pull off this S-class Quest under Fairy Tail's noses, shouldn't said plan account for the possibility of being discovered?

Then she remembered: the plan was to embark on the journey to Galuna Island _before_ being discovered.

Gray smirked, clearly enjoying Natsu's discomfort. "If you guys come with me now, perhaps the Guildmaster might choose not to expel you. Let's go back."

"Expelled?"

If Gray's words had sucked all the blood from Lucy's face, his next sentence impaled her heart with fear.

"As if I'm coming back!" To her surprise, Natsu replied with equal determination. "I'm doing an S-class Quest!"

"You're not nearly strong enough to do it! And look," Gray continued piteously, "imagine what would happen to all of you if Erza finds out..."

"Nothing will happen," Natsu shot back, "because Erza's on a quest, stupid! She won't be coming back!"

Just the thought of them fighting was enough to make Lucy faint, but she didn't get to. At that very moment, a second familiar voice appeared behind all of them.

"Wait a moment. Why are you here?"

"You took off without looking, b-baka!"

Wait... it couldn't be.

Lucy didn't recognize the second voice, but the first hit her as clear as day. She had heard this voice from Hargeon before, from someone who had helped her out not once, but twice. And that voice didn't belong to Natsu, no, this was someone else...

"I did go charging after Erza Onee-san, yes, and I did ignore her instructions. But you weren't supposed to be on my shoulders in the first place! Besides, your dad is waiting for you in Bougainvillea Village. It's been three years since you guys last met! Should you really be blowing him off like that?"

"I do miss my dad," the unfamiliar voice replied thoughtfully, before continuing happily with, "still, Oni-chan, I'm your apprentice. I'm here to learn how to become a hero, and I think my dad is okay with that. If he knows that I'm learning to save people like you, he'll be so glad! I know, I'll write him a letter too! I'll tell him how awesome my Hero is!"

The familiar voice walked into view in his trademark jeans and white shirt. His shirt was torn and burnt, and there was a blonde-haired girl sitting on his shoulders, but Lucy would recognize him even if he were drenched in pitch-black muck.

"Shirou!?"

"Shirou!?"

"Shirou! You ditched our team!"

There, standing on the Hargeon Docks with a surprised look on his face and a blonde girl on his shoulders, was Emiya Shirou.

*The Fairy Who Could*

"Shirou!?"

Shirou felt his jaw drop. There his guildmates were, frozen on the docks in mid-bicker, staring at him as if he had fallen out of the sky. Gray and Natsu, as usual, were butting heads already when they comically turned their attention to him, and Lucy looked utterly shell-shocked at Shirou's appearance. Then again, her eyes were flickering between the blonde-haired kid on his shoulders and him, so it was probably Sera's appearance that stunned her instead. But what were they doing, all the way out here at Hargeon?

"Hello, guys! What are you doing here?"

Even as he asked them, Shirou's mind was already spinning fast, fervently working out every possibility. As far as Shirou knew, Natsu, Lucy and Gray were definitely not on the same team. Why were they together? His mind raced through the possibilities: Erza had asked him to go straight back to Fairy Tail; had Makarov received the message already? Were they here to bring him back? From the maps he'd studied, Magnolia Town was on the way from Bougainvillea to Hargeon, so it was possible, but Erza couldn't have possibly anticipated his attempt to follow her, could she?

"Shirou! I thought you were on a job!" Lucy gaped, knees going soft.

Was Shirou here to nab them too? Erza and Expulsion was scary, but from what she'd heard, Shirou had taken down Zeref's demon Lullaby by himself! Besides, Mirajane had said before that Shirou went out with Erza, so did that mean that Erza was here in Hargeon, too!?

"Shirou! You're just in time!" Gray urged. "These guys took an S-class quest without our Guildmaster's permission. Help me bring them back!"

"Shirou! How dare you ditch our team!" Natsu raged, his fight with Gray clearly forgotten. "I'll kick your butt for that!"

"Technically, our Guildmaster pulled him out," Lucy reminded him, only to be ignored in the dregs of Natsu's fury. "Shirou, why are you here?"

"Thanks, Lucy. Yeah, about ditching your team, I'm very sorry. Old man Makarov had a message for me," Shirou replied sheepishly, setting a reluctant Sera down beside him. "When I woke up after that fight, I heard that you guys were at the Duke of Evaroo's library, so I decided if I could help anybody out with a quest while I was recovering. It- it's a long story. Anyways, what's this about an S-class quest?"

Lucy facepalmed. "Look, Shirou," she explained, "Quests don't all come in the same shape and size. Some are notably more dangerous than others. To prevent mages from doing quests well beyond their ability, Guilds separate quests into several levels of difficulty, ranging from the normal quests you see in the first floor of the Fiore Guild Hall, to S-class Quests on the second floor, to 100-year quests that only the best of mages can handle. The rules of every guild states that any team taking an S-class quest has to have an S-class mage with them."

"I see," Shirou nodded. "And none of you are S-class mages, so you are not permitted to go on the quest you've taken. That's simple, Gray." His eyes narrowed, and he nodded firmly, once. "Hey, sailor! how much does a trip to Galuna island cost?" At his beckoning, a magnificent sword appeared in his hands, seven jewels glittering along the pommel. "This should be enough, shouldn't it?"

"Galuna Island? But I told them, I'm not..." The sailor paled as a sword materialized in Shirou's hands, and he shook a little as he received it: a beautifully bejewelled blade with a blue handle, a golden hilt and runes inscribed across the blade. "You're a mage, aren't you? You're all mages! Come aboard, quickly!"

"Right! Natsu, you're coming back!" Gray cheered... only to see Shirou marching to the boat. "Wait, Shirou, what are you doing? Aren't you worried about what Erza would do? Don't you know how dangerous an S-class quest is? Do you really want to send Natsu, Lucy, and Happy to their deaths?"

Right, Erza. The lone protector of Fairy Tail. Knowing that Shirou was no match for the enemies that stood before him, Erza Scarlet battled in his place, once, twice. Now, she was pursuing his Avalon, his dream, in his stead. Her power, which far surpassed those of her peers in Fairy Tail, became the source of her isolation.

 _He was always alone, forging swords on a distant hill._

The aria of the wielders of Kanshou and Byakuya, of the Counter Guardian known as Heroic Spirit EMIYA. Pursuing his ideal without abandon, his companions became unable to catch up with him, and he gradually became alone in the field of blades. It was the harsh reality of his world, where people had to pursue their dreams on their own.

But he wasn't on Earth anymore. Shirou was on Fiore. He was with Erza, Natsu, Gray, Lucy, and Happy. The ideals that he shouldered, the burden of saving everyone that he bore, he didn't have to bear it alone anymore. Where they themselves couldn't fulfill their dreams alone, their peers, the mages by their shoulders, stepped up for them.

 _And if he sought his dream tirelessly, he did not do it alone, for he brought with him over a thousand blades._

"Look, Gray, I understand that it's not right for mages to pick quests that send them to their deaths, but a mage who's constantly sheltered from difficult missions cannot surpass himself," Shirou persuaded. "Natsu, you're in this because you want to become an S-class mage, right?"

"Eh? Yup, who wouldn't?"

"Gray. Natsu has set his eyes on the S-class seat. He's not going to let mere rules stop him. Are you," Shirou demanded, "going to deny him the chance to be an S-class mage, just because it's supposed to be to difficult? Or do you simply seek to stop him from becoming what he really wants to be?"

"Heh! If he wants to be an S-class mage, he's not the only one on the list! But what about his safety, Shirou Emiya?" Gray shot back, glaring at Shirou. "What will you do if an S-class danger, one capable of killing all of you, shows up?"

Shirou returned the gaze with equal tenacity.

"I'll assure you, Gray, I'm an Ally of Justice. I will save everyone from that," he clenched his fist, "even if it means my death."

Their eyes met. For the first time, Gray looked carefully into Shirou, searching for sincerity in his eyes. But what he found there surprised even him, gave him a feeling he couldn't describe. His eyes were steely cold, not with disdain, but with the keen edge of a freshly forged sword. The message was clear: Shirou meant every word he said.

"… Alright, Shirou," Gray grumbled. "I understand where you're coming from. But if anything happens to Natsu, Lucy, or Happy, it's on your head."

"I understand," Shirou replied firmly. Saving people was serious business, and he would have to bear responsibility for each decision he made.

"Then I'm coming. Natsu, stop cheering. You're annoying."

Natsu whooped anyway, following a silent Gray and a thoughtful Lucy onboard the little boat. And now for Sera...

Shirou's orange irises met Sera's turquoise eyes and hesitated.

In many ways, Sera was just like him: a kid who was saved from incredible tragedy, and who, upon witnessing his act of salvation, wanted to save people just like he did. But to follow his ideals simply because she admired him, was to chase a path not her own. When the harsh realities of salvation crashed down on her, she would be betrayed, just as Archer was, by her own ideals.

A harsh fate that he would not wish on anyone save himself. It was the path he had chosen. But if he chose it, then, too, he could not deny the choice to Sera. To make that decision in Sera's place, when he was not Sera, would be to become a bigger hypocrite. It was only right for Sera to decide for herself, if the hero's path was the right one for her.

 _Sorry, Saber. I'll retrieve your sheath later._

"Sera," Shirou asked. "Are you coming with us?"

The blonde girl hopped in without a second word.

"Alright. Nice to have you on board, Sera. Lucy, could you brief us on the quest details?"

*The Fairy Who Could*

"So that's the job," Lucy finished.

They were in the middle of an open sea, the tiny fishing boat bobbing against the choppy seas. Natsu, his eyes glazed over and drool seeping from his mouth, looked hardly better than the sea kelp that battered their boat, and Sera lay prone between him and Shirou with an equally defeated look on her exhausted face. As Shirou tended to them, he mulled the job details over in his mind.

"A curse, huh. And we're supposed to lift it?"

"Yeah."

It was not a simple job, doubly for Shirou. Sure, he could already think of a few Noble Phantasms that could possibly help, but it was a curse, and from what he knew of curses in general they were designed to be hard to lift. Of course, Rule Breaker could do the job in an instant, but to use it on an entire village would burn his mana reserves away ten times over. More, if he didn't know what exactly he was supposed to lift.

And then there was the issue of the island itself. Galuna Island and its inhabitants had clearly been around for some time, given the age of the job request. However, a rural island like that was unlikely to receive many visitors, especially those who were unfamiliar with its location and its quirks. In short, anybody who would lay such a widespread curse over the island was already intimately familiar with it, likely already an inhabitant for a long time, but who would shoot themselves in the foot like that?

Something else was going on, definitely, but just what?

"So, Shirou... What do you think?"

"There's something we're missing," Shirou thought aloud. "Something very important, that concerns the curse, and we don't know what it is."

"Perhaps I can help."

The sailor, who had been silent all this while, spoke up. "My name is Bobo," he said, with a dark look over his shoulder. "I used to be an inhabitant on that island a long time ago."

"But I fled that island."

"When you get onto that island, Misfortune will befall you. You may already know the island is cursed, but can you really lift its curse?"

He swept his cloak aside, and Lucy gasped. Barbed. Gnarled. Twisted in black. If Bobo's arm had belonged to a human before, its appearance now showed no sign.

"The curse of demonic transformation." Shirou spoke up, not taking his eyes off of the sailor. "I knew there was something off about you when we first met. You had a sweet, tangy scent, one that could only belong to a demon. You were definitely waiting for us there, weren't you? Back in Hargeon."

"Indeed I was," the sailor replied. If he was surprised in any way, it did not show on his face.

"Then let me ask you, Bobo," Shirou continued, narrowing his eyes. "Is there something you're not telling us about the island? About the curse?"

S-class quest regulations were one thing, but he'd be damned if he was going to lead them blindly to their deaths. Lucy, Gray, Natsu and Happy were his guildmates, Sera was his new companion, and it was his job to protect all of them.

"I do have my own thoughts, but I myself can't confirmed them," Bobo replied, giving nothing away. Before Shirou could respond, he added, "The island's coming up. You should take a good look at-huh?"

Bobo fell silent. Shirou followed his gaze to the growing speck on the horizon, and...

Oh.

The island was burning.

Galuna island was burning. Even from such a distance, Shirou could see the flames that engulfed the island, the giant pillar of smoke rising from its once-lush forests. Somehow or other, a bushfire had consumed the island, and the island blazed like a giant pyre ship.

"What... what happened? What happened while I was gone?"

"Look out!" Sera yelled. Somehow, in the few seconds that they'd spend staring an island, a tidal wave had risen behind them. Gray had a split second to grab Sera before the wave swept over them, driving Shirou, Lucy, Natsu, and the rest of the boat toward Davy Jones' Locker.

*"They're awake, madam."*

*"Leave them to me, Captain. You've done well."*

"Aye aye, lass!"

The unfamiliar voices swept over Shirou's waterlogged ears. He climbed groggily, shook his head, and looked around him. Gray's unconscious form lay, Sera securely wrapped in his grasp. Lucy, Natsu and Bobo weren't much better, sprawled all over the deck in their own patches of seawater.

Wait. There were tall wooden masts around them, men in stained shirts moving about, adjusting the sails. They were on a ship, and judging from the unfurling black sails and the pirate flag high above him, it was a pirate ship.

This was bad. He had to get all of them off, before they were all sold as slaves or pressed into service...

"So, Shirou, you're finally awake."

Shirou couldn't believe his eyes.

This person could not be here. Not now. Not on this ship. Not while he was backing an S-class quest illegally. Not while he had pursued Avalon against orders. Every one of his senses screamed at him to run, to jump off the ship and dive into the unforgiving depths of the ocean, because nothing could possibly be worse than the furious armoured woman crossing her arms before him, and yet, every one of those instincts warned him that escape was impossible. The woman would stop him before he even got close to the edge.

"I gave you an order, Shirou. So. Why. Are. You. Out. Here?"

Because the woman in front of him was Erza Scarlet.


End file.
